The Watch Below

by James White

  If he had not had this ridiculous feeling of shame over what they were doing, the captain would have admired the smooth manner in which the young female was moving from a criticism of Hellseggorn's ancestors and her own to a criticism of Hellseggorn himself. The water in the food ship's control room had been heated, by now it must be coming close to the boil.

  "You are intelligent enough without doubt," she went on, in a tone which was pleasant but just a shade doubtful, "to realize that we can bring another food ship to ourselves if the situation warrants it, and ignore you. But we did not wish to ignore you or to waste another ship whose animals are needed to populate the seas of the target world with a food supply which we can be sure will suit our metabolism. We want you to be reunited with us, and soon.

  "We are approaching the target sun."

  There was a moment's silence, then Hellseggorn said furiously, "We have been approaching the target sun since the moment of take-off, and all these arguments have been used, with very few variations, on my parents and grandparents, and they have invariably ended with the climactic piece of data that the target sun was practically warming up our nose cones -- a piece of data at which, apparently, we were expected to tie ourselves in knots and blow green bubbles from sheer ecstasy. All it did then, and does now, is make us angrier! Lying is bad enough, but a lie as unoriginal as that is an insult to the intelligence!

  "I am breaking contact -- "

  "No, wait!" said the flagship urgently. "This is all true, sir! You know that your ship was meant to be a sub-fleet leader with a crew of three but was later changed to an unmanned slave under the control of the flagship. Your control room has manual overrides for certain internal controls -- lighting, warming, and jettisoning the cargo -- which had to be tested during the final stages of construction. But you have no control of your main drive, neither have you any means of seeing outside your ship -- "

  "We can't see," Hellseggorn shouted, "so if you tell us space is bright pink with yellow stars we must believe you!" He added a remark very rarely made by a male Unthan toward a female of the species, dealing as it did with certain abnormal methods of reproduction.

  "Personally I don't care if you believe me or not!" the comm officer shouted back. She was really angry now, and not just baiting him. "We are getting close to the target sun! We are not interested in you solely because of your food supply, although meat would certainly improve our health. Our main concern is for your children. . . ."

  Deslann Five thudded gently into the vast wall that was the food ship's side, and wriggled until all his padded magnets were in contact with the plating. By that time the rest of his party, all twenty-eight of them, had also arrived and secured themselves. As quickly as possible they moved to the midships lock, a personnel lock used when the ship had been abuilding in orbit around Untha, and began opening its outer seal. What they were doing might very well be registering on the control-room telltales, but they hoped nobody was looking at them. Their water was beginning to taste stale.

  ". . . Our healers feel strongly about this," the angry female voice was saying, "and so do I! It's an unnatural life for any child, or an adult for that matter. The low temperature, for one thing, must have an inhibiting effect on their intelligence -- this is a known and accepted fact, our healers say. And with all respect, sir, since you had no control over your childhood environment, I suggest that your own inability to grasp . . ."

  The water in the food ship's control room exploded into steam at that point, metaphorically speaking, as Hellseggorn reacted to the suggestion that he was mentally retarded. Deslann and his party were packed into the lock, outer seal closed and inner seal open, directing as many cutting beams as could be brought to bear on the ice on the other side. In their case the explosions of steam, mixed with hot water and chunks of melting ice, made the metaphor almost literally true.

  Deslann Five stayed in the lock while the others went to extend their bridgehead. He was trying to find the connection to the lock's outside antenna so as to reestablish contact with the flagship, lost when they had penetrated the metal hull of the food ship. When he discovered it and plugged it in, he found his communications officer speaking on another wavelength.

  ". . . Can you hear me, sir?" the female was saying worriedly. "They know something is going on. I repeat, they are sure that it is an attack, but are not yet certain of the exact locality. Flagship to Captain Deslann. The food ship has now broken contact, but they know something is going on."

  "Got it," said Deslann. "You did very well, Hayellin. Stay on that wavelength, it's clearer . . ."

  Suddenly Deslann could not breathe. The water in his suit was like thick, warm mud and his vision was going. Desperately he tore off the plates of his suit covering his gills and wriggled furiously to expel the foul water, but the fresh water which came in was so hot that he grunted in agony. On the point of losing consciousness he grabbed two pieces of ice which were hanging nearby and pressed them against his gills. When he breathed slowly the water passing around the ice was cooled enough not to scald his lungs. Then as soon as he could speak again he detailed one of his party to stand by the communicator and swam quickly through the inner seal.

  Inside the lock a large hemisphere had been melted out of the solid ice filling the main hold of the food ship, a hemisphere which looked tiny only because the hold was so vast. It was expanding slowly as his party attacked the icy walls with their heat beams and it was filled with water close to boiling in some places while a short distance further on the water was icy cold. And there were chunks of ice, some of them as big as Deslann, which hung like invisible rocks in his path. The rear half of one of the food animals filling the hold, a thick, torpedo shape ending in a broad, razor-edged tail, projected from the ice wall on one side, and the head and dorsal of another animal from the other. The expression on its face, frozen there when it and its companions in the hold had been cooled so many generations ago, made Deslann want suddenly to laugh.

  With all the movement inside the hemisphere, the temperature of the water would find a more comfortable level and the blocks of ice would shrink, but the food animals might not survive their partial warm-up -- they were tough, but their revival required a sudden rise in temperature together with a carefully timed dose of the radiation which would shock their hearts and nervous systems back into life. But it was not, Deslann told himself, as if these two would be the only beasts rendered permanently rather than temporarily dead.

  Peering through the ice at the twisted, frozen bodies he could see several whose edible parts were missing. The partly eaten bodies were grouped together and were surrounded by a pinkish fog, and a narrow band of fog ran through the center of the hold towards the bow. He knew from intelligence gathered by the second expedition that the enemy did not have heat beams but, in melting their tunnels, used chemical methods which left a pinkish residue on the ice walls. Deslann gave orders quickly, and with their gill openings packed with chips of ice they began melting their way through to the enemy tunnel.

  And in the tunnel they found the water suddenly blackened with mud bombs and out of the murk there came darting a stream of silvery, metal fish. The fish moved fairly slowly since they were being fired from spring-loaded guns at extreme range, but when they met their target, no matter how gently, a charge at the rear of the dart exploded, driving the barb deeply into the fabric of the spacesuits and the flesh beneath. Deslann, who was in the lead, blundered into a chunk of ice and began pushing it ahead of him as a shield, but the people following him were not so lucky. A lot of the metal darts were slipping past his shield and the tunnel throbbed with the coughs and grunts of the wounded and with the pounding of their suddenly uncontrollable bodies against the walls and each other as the coating on the metal barbs attacked their nervous systems.

  But the blackness around him was beginning to lighten, and the tunnel was opening out into the main living pool. Suddenly the enemy, males, females, and children, were all around them, easy targets for
their own dart guns despite the nursery nets and decorative vegetation scattered about the pool. Their darts had been treated by the flagship's healers with a fast-acting anaesthetic -- they were not, after all, on a mission of extermination -- and the enemy did not have the protection of spacesuits. But the food-ship people did not know that the darts striking them were nonlethal and fought bitterly with guns, lances, and even teeth. The numbers of dead and dying on both sides continued to. rise steadily, because Deslann's people had taken too much punishment and were killing mad. Instead of anaesthetic darts they were beginning to use their heat beams.

  "If you have to kill them," the captain shouted urgently, "kill females!"

  Then finally it was all over. The control room and associated compartments, the secondary pools and their connecting tunnels were searched and cleared of all sentient Unthan life. The dead were left to drift in water that was already cooling into the ice which would hold them immobile like the other beasts thronging the ship. The survivors, who were mainly children, had been moved to the flagship and only Deslann Five and the enemy captain were left.

  "We were telling you the truth," Deslann said angrily as he, too, left the food ship, pushing the spacesuited and badly injured body of Captain Hellseggorn before him. "Although we could not risk telling you all of it, your minds back there were closed, you were no longer completely civilized, and we did not know how you might react. But we did not want your meat supply alone, and we did desperately want to be reunited with you.

  "Surely you must have noticed," he went on, "that the expedition, with the exception of myself, was made up entirely of females. The reason for that is because the number of males born to us on the flagship has fallen to one in twenty, and the majority of those have been sterile.

  "So we needed you, badly," Deslann the Fifth went on furiously, "and we did not want you dead. We were not intending to kill any of you, except by accident, and we were relying on surprise. From the previous expedition we learned that your children, unlike ours, were healthy and more evenly balanced as to sex. We think your diet had something to do with that. But we badly need those children.

  "Without them there would be no future, no crew to man the flagship and guide the fleet during the most important stage of the journey. Surely you see that."

  But Captain Hellseggorn was not seeing anything. During the last few minutes of the fighting he had swum through a patch of water freshly boiled by a heat beam and his eyes, like the mind behind them, were permanently closed in blindness. He could not see the two great ships which hung in the darkness ahead and behind him, or the single star which blazed like a beacon against a backdrop of fainter suns. He could not see and would not believe that the journey's end was so very, very near.

  XIX

  In the stern section of Gulf Trader the settlement of the Young People did not prosper well after the third generation. First there was the serious blow to their morale caused by the ports in Richard's Rooms becoming covered with a thin green scum which rendered them translucent rather than transparent and finally completely opaque. They could no longer look out at the sandy sea bed or the rocks or at the wrinkled, silvery surface far above them, so that all these things became secondhand facts, or part of the Game, and took the first step toward becoming fiction. The second major misfortune was that the three young couples were suffering, as was everyone else in the ship, from vitamin deficiencies affecting their hair among other things. The men were prematurely bald and two of the women's hair had gone gray in patches and was falling out. But the worst misfortune; a medical disaster in the doctor's opinion, was that the female Young People were all expecting babies.

  In the ordinary way a child born into the world of the ship could expect to receive hair both from its mother's head and its father's head and chin. The early uniforms and sacking had long since been worn to tatters and even the tatters had rotted away in the increasingly damp atmosphere, so that clothing made from human hair was all that an infant had to keep it warm between birth and the age when it gained enough intelligence and physical control to wear the stiffer vegetable fibers. Plant fibers were useful for bedding and little else, and even the clothing made from a mixture of plant and hair came apart or wore out too easily. Hair was warm, flexible, and easily worked, and its only disadvantage was that it took so long to grow.

  For many generations it had been the custom to cut hair off at the roots, regardless of age or sex, as soon as it reached a useful length. The only exceptions were in the cases of young people close to maturity, who were allowed to retain their hair since they could be expected to marry within a few years and would want their first-born to be warmly clothed.

  A male beard, no matter how bushy or luxuriant, could supply only a small fraction of the quantity grown on a healthy head. But the hair of the Young People couples, not to mention their general health, left much to be desired in the doctor's opinion, and this deficiency caused such deep concern among them that their Game suffered and for days at a stretch almost died from the psychological poison of worry. That was one of the reasons why the doctor offered to help out by donating his own sparse growth when next it became due for cutting.

  Dr. James Eichlan Wallis was nineteen years old and suffered from a badly twisted spine (his mother, an epileptic, had had several falls during the later stages of her pregnancy) and a visually, and tactually repulsive skin condition. His offer, as he knew it would be, despite his many reassurances that the condition was not transmissible, allowed him to take advantage of their resulting feelings of awkwardness over the refusal: by pressing his arguments for having them forget their senseless, and by now almost nonexistent, differences with the Seniors for'rard.

  Except for the very infrequent visits of the elected commander aft for the purpose of marriage and the five-yearly inspection and the times when the Young People went amidships to serve in absolute silence on the generator, the only contact between the two groups was the doctor. He was able to tell them, therefore, of the greater comfort of the Senior living quarters, of the extra warmth and of the reserves of clothing available in an emergency -- which could make all the difference to a patient in shock. He admitted that the improvement in conditions would be fractional, but important nonetheless, and at times his arguments were so vehement that for days on end the Young People refused to talk to him. Even the Seniors displayed toward him a certain coolness due to some of his arguments which had been loud enough to carry the length of the ship, and to the things he had said which were not intended to be heard by both sides. The one argument he could not use, partly because he was the doctor and partly because the change in living quarters was unlikely to affect the result, was to tell the Young People females the truth about their chances of surviving their approaching confinements.

  He was disappointed, but not surprised, when his arguments got him precisely nowhere.

  Until . . .

  The first girl died in childbirth, not surprisingly considering her history of repeated bouts of rheumatic fever as a child and the condition in which it had left her heart. Her baby, a girl, gave a satisfactory cry on being smacked, but a few seconds later became cyanosed and died. A few days later the father died from a fractured skull sustained when he fell from Richard's Rooms to the floor of Number Twelve. He had somehow managed to avoid the ladder on his way down, and the indications were that he had not put his arms out to help break his fall.

  Two Senior women arrived bringing a rusty tin of powdered milk, nearly two pounds of hair, and unlimited amounts of sympathy and help. Their action in coming aft was tantamount to mutiny, but they explained that they could not bear to listen to the harrowing details of life in the Young People's section which the doctor kept giving them. And so, despite a history in all respects the same as her predecessor, the second mother managed to cling to life, and so did her baby son. The third girl, whose physical condition was the worst of all, did not survive, although her daughter did. Coincidentally, the baby's father had an accident on
the generator a few days later -- a real rather than a deliberate accident, this time.

  The gearing had jammed just as he had worked up to full speed and he was pressing down hard on the left pedal. Foot pressure snapped the pedal in half and the raw edge tore an eight-inch gash in his leg. The doctor sutured with hair and bound it tightly with leaves and plant fiber, which was the best he could do, but the man was a bleeder and there was never any hope for him.

  It was at this point that the Young People became reabsorbed into the Seniors. At first there was a certain awkwardness -- a feeling that the Seniors were simply performing a duty toward the surviving Young People, much as a family will look after the newly orphaned children of a distant and not very well-liked relative -- but gradually this awkwardness disappeared. The newcomers were eagerly absorbing material which had been allowed to drop from the Young People's Game and in turn they were bringing three generations of fresh, new memories to the Seniors' Game. Some of this data included dialogue on the planning, preparation, and execution of four separate escape attempts, and they were without doubt the most stirring passages in the whole history of the submerged ship. It was as if some heavy, invisible load had been lifted from them by the simple fact of their being reunited. The whole, as the trite old saying had it, really was greater than the sum of its parts.