The Watch Below

by James White

  He was at a loss to understand the reason for the split in the first place. It was nothing so simple as impetuous youth fighting senile decay. Because of the necessity for conserving food, water, and to a lesser extent air, there was nothing to do all day except exercise one's brain, so that physical methods of self-expression were discouraged by young and old alike. Fighting among themselves, a closed community in such a harsh environment, was unthinkable. And while the youths might be mentally impetuous the oldsters were not mentally senile. On Gulf Trader there was no such condition.

  His hereditary medical knowledge, the doctor had good reason to believe, had reached him subject to less change over the years than some material he could think of -- the discipline of his specialized, traditionally unmarried predecessors had been strict. Doctor Radford, the First, had stated that their hair and teeth might fall out, but the Game had trained their minds to such a fine pitch that they need never fear becoming dotards.

  The doctor walked across the floor of Number Twelve and began climbing the ladder, still without putting a hand or a foot wrong. It was not until he ascended to Richard's Rooms and the absolute darkness gave way to the dim, bluish light from the portholes that he began to trip and stumble, and that was because he was using his eyes to judge distances instead of relying on memory to tell him the exact positions of things. Greeting the five young people who were sitting cross-legged around the cabin, he picked his way between them to stand at the port. While the others resumed talking he looked out and up through the scummy glass.

  The outlines of the navigation bridge and deck fittings and the towering precipice of the reef on the port side had an intensity of blackness almost frightening, as if the gray light filtering down from the surface was being absorbed hungrily and sucked away into some other continuum, never to escape again as a highlight or reflection. When an occasional phosphorescent creature blew past in the current, it seemed almost dazzling against those inky shadows.

  It was a moonlit night up there, with little if any cloud. Clouds were shapeless collections of water vapor at a great height which could totally obscure the Moon but could not do the same with the light of the Sun, and which under certain conditions released water over a large area -- but slowly, as if a ceiling had sprung hundreds of tiny leaks. The Moon was an arid, airless body of near-planetary dimensions circling the Earth at a distance of approximately 238,000 miles and shone by the reflected light of the Sun, a G-type star situated near the rim of the parent galaxy. . . .

  Or so the older people would have said. And if asked -- or even if they had not been asked -- they would have added a mind-staggering weight of astronomical detail. But the younger people sitting around him, especially the thirteen-year-old Arthur Sullivan Wallis, might have said that the people on the surface were operating their standby generator while checking the wiring of the big one, just as they did on the ship. The doctor knew that the people for'rard believed in their G-type sun, but that ASW did not wholly believe in his stupendous topside generator which probably needed thousands of people to work its pedals. Arthur Sullivan Wallis did not wholly believe in anything.

  At the moment, however, there was nothing wild or heretical about the things he was saying. The doctor turned from the porthole to listen.

  ". . . So the food can't last forever even if we agree to drastically reduce the future population," Arthur was saying. "Everybody agrees to this measure, particularly when they have just become parents for the first time and realize what a dangerous and painful thing childbirth is in this place. But usually it isn't until the second time that they do anything about it. In any case the population is going down due to worsening living conditions. It hasn't been as low as twelve since -- "

  "We could grow more food," said his sister, Irene MacDougall Wallis.

  "That would help with the clothing problem, too," said her cousin, Bing Churchill Dickson. "Plant fiber material can't be made into an overall, it comes apart too easily and it can't be washed at all. But it's warm and if we had more growing plants -- "

  "I agree," said Randolph Brutus Dickson, the fourth member of the group. "Even though shredded beanstalks itch like blazes, I prefer them to going around raw like this. I haven't felt warm since I was a baby."

  The fifth member of the party laughed. She was Elizabeth Graves Wallis and she laughed at everything. When she wasn't laughing she smiled silently and played with her fingers, and she was without doubt the happiest person in the ship.

  "Extending the garden won't work," Arthur resumed patiently, "because we haven't the necessary wiring or light bulbs. At the rate we're blowing them they won't outlast the food supply, and increasing the number of lighting points will use them up that much quicker. No bulbs means no light, no beans, and no air. As I see it there is no solution to the problem within the ship, which means that we must work towards rescue."

  At that point the doctor began to feel a little bit disappointed in ASW. Methods of attracting the attention of the people on the surface were always being tried, although much less frequently of late, from simple banging on the hull in Morse to running lights into Richard's Rooms and flashing them through the portholes at night. But the attempts had served only to make everyone unhappy for months afterwards, and now they were actively discouraged. Thinking about rescue was like thinking about girls, a phase of youth.

  "My idea was to use the Rooms here," Arthur went on, "to get one of us to the surface. The door to the weather deck is rusted solid and the same goes for the portholes, but I was thinking of smashing the glass and squeezing through, or being pushed through by an adult, and swimming to the surface. To get through the port it would have to be a seven- or eight-year-old. Or ten, maybe, if be was thin enough.

  "He would have to be well briefed on what to say to the people up there," ASW went on, "and would carry something -- a message and the lieutenant commander's identity card, perhaps -- so that if he didn't make it to the shore alive, or his verbal report was not believed at first, they would still know we were here. . . ."

  "J-just a Imnute!" the doctor broke in aghast. "You can't do that! The port would be a tight squeeze even for a skinny eight-year-old, and there would be jagged edges of glass around the rim. You couldn't be sure of breaking all of them away with the water pouring in. The kid would be cut to ribbons on the way out!"

  "The adult," said Arthur seriously, "would be a volunteer who knew that he was going to die, so he would not panic. He would be tied in position so that the inrush of water would not sweep him away from the port, and while the boy kept his head in the air for as long as possible and hyperventilated the adult would knock all of the loose glass from the rim of the port. When the water rose above the top edge of the port the air trapped in the upper part of the room would slow the influx of water and allow plenty of time for the boy to be assisted through the port -- "

  "No!"

  This time it was Irene who objected, and she sounded personally afraid rather than shocked at the idea as she went on, "It would mean losing the Rooms and making the ship blind ! I don't think I could stand that. Our parents might -- they don't like coming here because they can see out and that makes them uncomfortable. But I want to know that there is somewhere else besides the ship, something else besides rusting metal walls and damp bedding and this everlasting cold and stench.

  "I'd like to live up here," she added vehemently, "and look out at the light all the time. No matter what it is that makes it."

  There was a long silence, broken by Arthur who said, "I agree with you completely Irene. That's why I mentioned my second-best idea first. The other one involves no children, but we would have to use Richard's Hole for purposes other than the one for which it was intended. . . ."

  The doctor listened without interrupting while Arthur Sullivan Wallis expanded on his best idea, thinking that a person less timid than himself would have been laying down the law in no uncertain terms after the first few sentences. Even so, when he did finally speak, Dr. Kimball Bus
h Dickson thought that his voice carried a little of the rasp possessed by the first doctor when someone was being wilfully stupid.

  He said, "The bilges are impassable, Arthur, you know that! We've been told that people have died cleaning out the bilges on ships like this: They lost their way among the intercostal spaces and couldn't find the way back to the entry point. Even with lights and the bilge water only a few inches deep it would be next to impossible to travel half the length of the ship through the space between the double bottom -- it's too tight a squeeze, for one thing. In pitch darkness with the bilges completely under water and dragging an air hose and trying to hold your helmet vertical all the time -- !"

  "I'll be careful with the hose," said Arthur, in a voice which must have been identical to that used by his ancestor Richard when his seniors were trying to argue him out of opening up the Rooms, "and the helmet will be tied to my shoulders. The idea is to use a bucket filled with air fed through the hose from the hole. It will be open at the bottom so that I'll have to keep my head upright to keep the air from spilling out, and there will be no need of a visor because it will be dark anyway.

  "I've thought about this for a long time," he went on seriously, "and have decided to try for the stern opening. The torpedo which hit the bow opened the forepeak, and to reach there would mean climbing up through the forward coffer dam, which is thought to be badly damaged and perhaps blocked with wreckage. The second torpedo struck below the waterline astern, and its opening is much closer to the Hole -- "

  "You've thought about it," the doctor broke in, "but not enough, obviously! Did you think about the scavengers we see in the Hole? They're all small fish, not more than two inches across. If nothing bigger can get in, how are you going to get out?"

  Arthur's teeth glowed briefly in the dark as he smiled. "Maybe the bigger fish aren't interested in getting in, Doctor, when there are so many small fish more easily goi at outside."

  "Doesn't it bother you," said the doctor, trying another tack, "that during the first dozen yards of your journey you will be crawling through the bones of all the people who have died in the ship? Some of them have died quite recently and the scavengers might not have finished with them. . . ."

  "Now," said Arthur scornfully, "you're beginning to sound like my father recalling an Edgar Allan Poe -- "

  The doctor kept on arguing, off and on, until the day early in the following spring when Arthur Wallis and Randy Dickson, who was to see to the paying out of the hose, made the escape attempt, even though he had realized long since that he was simply wasting his breath.

  The long, narrow, rusting world of Gulf Trader lay cold and dark and silent. With both its generators still and the women moved far forward into One with orders to keep the children quiet at all costs, the only sounds in the ship were made by Arthur's bucket helmet scraping the other side of the deck beneath their feet. Barefoot, shivering, and speaking in whispers if they spoke at all, they traced Arthur's slow progress from Richard's Hole to the intercostals under Eleven. At that point he was more than halfway to the holed stern, with just the spaces under Twelve, the aft coffer dam, the fuel bunker, and the more confined spaces under the engine-room flat still to go. But it was at that point that something went wrong.

  The scraping of Arthur's helmet against the metal floor became louder and more erratic, and there was a softer, muffled sound as if he might have been banging on the plating with his fists. Shortly afterwards the noises stopped.

  XVIII

  Somebody had committed the unforgivable crime of moving a packing case without previously notifying the change of position. The case could very well have been moved accidentally by one of the children playing, although none of them would admit to doing so, and the change of position was less than two yards. But Irene MacDougall Wallis walked into it in the dark and painfully bruised her knee and thigh. The pain and the fright and the recent death of her brother Arthur under Tank Eleven all contributed to what happened then.

  The split began because of Irene's insistence that the case had been moved deliberately, with malice aforethought, and that its movement constituted an act of violence on someone's part, and she further insisted that the someone in question could only be one or more of the seniors. Until then the history of the ship had been free from violence -- the small domestic rows did not count, being purely verbal affairs -- so that the incident of the packing case caused a lot of bad feeling. Despite the efforts of the doctor, the rift could not be closed, and gradually the young people moved their living quarters aft. They started their own garden in Eleven, and they organized their own Game.

  They took their turn on the generator and occasionally, when the Seniors wanted to dig out an operetta or a Shakespeare, they would send a couple of good voices to complete the cast. There was very little said, however, during generator duty and the exchanges of talent became fewer. Inevitably the Young People grew old themselves and had difficult, rebellious young people of their own to contend with, but the common ground of parenthood was not enough to close the widening rift between the two factions. All the knowledge of the original survivors together with the intervening ship history was available to both groups by way of the Game, but now history was beginning to diverge.

  There were no further acts of violence, however, although the deaths directly attributable to the split grew at an alarming rate -- at least the doctors, who traditionally had a foot in each camp, found them so. The stern section was the coldest part of the ship and damp and corrosion had taken the strongest hold there. Infant mortality was high and the adults rarely lived beyond the mid-fifties. And in each generation there was at least one young, intelligent, and relatively healthy boy or girl who died, like Arthur Sullivan Wallis, in the frigid darkness of the bilges trying to escape from the only world they knew.

  And far, far above them other men and women were escaping from their world, to places like the Moon and Mars and the Jovian satellites. Some of them died, too.

  The third and final expedition against the food ship led by Captain Deslann the Fifth hung like a slow-moving shoal of fish between the flagship and the target vessel. Unlike the tiny creatures which their ancestors had known on Untha, these fish had to carry a little of their ocean with them, and there was barely enough of it to take them to the enemy ship. That was one of the reasons why peace talks were at the moment still going on between the enemy captain and his senior communications officer -- so Deslann Five thought cynically as the two voices sounded in his suit communicator. His enemy counterpart was old and short-tempered and male like himself while the comm officer was very young and female and unusually well gifted with intelligence and self-assurance, so that the combination was unlikely to produce a peaceful settlement to their problem. It might, however, cause enough of a diversion in the enemy ship to allow the expedition to land undetected.

  Deslann Five had to remind himself firmly that he was on the side of Right, otherwise his feelings of shame would have reached uncomfortable proportions.

  "Asking about the health of our children," Captain Hellseggorn in the food ship was saying angrily, "is merely a preliminary to inquiring about the number of them, which is a transparent attempt to discover the probable strength of the present adult population. Do you think we are stupid? The children are doing well -- they get enough meat, you see -- and the number of adults, while less than yours, since over here we don't proliferate like wild rulties, is sufficient. We are not going back to the flagship, and if you try forcing us to do so you will find it as effective as your present stupid arguments!

  "Why don't you simply ask for food, which is what you really want?" Hellseggorn went on. "The answer will still be 'No,' of course, because you wouldn't stop at taking food. Our ancestors escaped your brand of fanaticism six generations ago, and I will not allow any of my people to be reconverted to that . . . that . . ."

  "The discipline isn't nearly so strict now," the quiet, feminine, maddeningly reasonable voice from the flagship broke in. "We
no longer insist on six or more trainees for every post, and the captain's position, which is the most important, has only two understudies. And we realize, sir, that it was the too-rigid insistence on purely technical training which drove your forebears into living on the food ship. We did not expect them to cut down on the supply of meat, which aggravated the situation. Especially as your ship is so packed with food animals that you could never eat your way through them in a hundred generations. But now there is ample opportunity for cultural as well as technical studies, so that you no longer have anything to fear in that respect."