The Watch Below

by James White

  The deck and wall plating of all the tanks were red and gritty with rust, except for one wall of the generator room which was kept clean and smooth for purposes of education. In the condensation which formed there every day was written the alphabet or passages from books, or pictures or characters out of stories, or completely original compositions of words or pictures. And the Game itself was taking on a new and original dimension. As well as operetta, plays, stories, and sections of ship history being sung and acted out there was the exciting exploratory work being done on the probable background and motivation of subsidiary characters, particularly villains and extraterrestrials whose characterization always had been unsatisfactory from the point of view of credibility and depth. Some of this work was the most amusing, stimulating, and downright rewarding that had ever been done on the ship. Still, the renaissance did not stop short at the purely intellectual and artistic exercises of the Game.

  During the months of summer they spent a few minutes each day hammering out an SOS on the hull. They felt a little ridiculous doing this, but in some obscure fashion it strengthened their faith in a world outside themselves and their ship. The insulation of their wiring kept rotting and peeling away, causing shorts and blowing out bulbs that were in terribly short supply, and leaving the ship without light for days on end. An ambitious project for rewiring the tanks and rebuilding the generator was initiated and carried through to a successful conclusion. Only three of the tanks were being lit while two sections of the garden were allowed to die in darkness, for so much of the wiring had to be discarded as useless; however, there were nowhere near as many people as there had been in the old days and fewer lighting points meant fewer bulbs wasted.

  Another daring attempt, based on the facts that glass is a good conductor of heat and that plant life tends to wither and die when subject to a sudden rise in temperature, gave the ship back its sight: There had been a real danger of cracking the porthole glass and flooding Richard's Rooms and the whole of Number Twelve below them if heat from a fire had been applied too quickly; but instead the green scum that had gathered on the outside of the ports had turned yellow and peeled away. If they were willing to brave the cold and damp of the Rooms, and many of them were, they'd be able to look out at the rocks and sandy bottom and up at the restless, wrinkled sky or watch inquisitive fish watching them. . . .

  They even ran a light to the Rooms, using the best of the discarded wiring and being especially careful to protect the circuit with fuses so that the precious light bulbs would not suffer. The light was to be used only in an emergency, for signaling purposes.

  The rust was everywhere and it abraded his bare feet as he walked, but the doctor could remember it no other way, and the seams of the tank plating sweated constantly as the water outside tried to push its way through. That also was normal, although it was said that in the good old days the tank walls were clean and bone dry. The tanks themselves were supposed to have been filled with bright, clean tools and equipment, their floors hidden under an eight- or ten-foot layer of foodstuffs and heaps of soft, warm sacking lying about simply for the picking up. Now the tanks were empty except for the heaps of rusting, useless junk piled in the corners, and the small area in Seven where their remaining store of food was kept. With lighting restricted to three tanks, the two remaining gardens were needed for photosynthesis rather than to eke out their dwindling food supply. Then there were the light bulbs and the increasingly difficult jobs of processing drinking water and finding lubrication for the generator.

  But these were all the old, accepted, everyday problems. The doctor was aware that the ship, like everyone in it, would die someday. But no sane person -- and the inhabitants of Gulf Trader were sane, the Game saw to that -- would ruin his or her whole life by worrying over the last few minutes of it. In actual fact there was nothing for any of them to complain about.

  Altogether this was a happy, exciting time to be living in, and at nineteen James Eichlan Wallis felt very glad that he had been born when he had.

  The target sun was so close that the small telescope in the flagship was able to resolve the tiny blurs representing its planets. But the framework of the infinitely larger and more sensitive instrument, so vast that its construction was possible only in the weightless conditions of space, was taking form between the two ships. A slightly smaller edition of the great telescope which had been set up so long ago in the doomed Unthan system to search space for a second home for their race, it would be capable, when the silvered plastic film of its reflector had been stretched into place, of resolving individual waves on the oceans of the third planet. With this bigger telescope they would obtain detailed charts of the land and sea areas, and with the aid of information sent back from the high-acceleration probes already shooting ahead of them they would choose their landing areas.

  Meanwhile the position of every unit of the great fleet would have to be checked and, if necessary, corrected. The control and guidance system that would allow them to apply thrust simultaneously to each and every ship had to be tested, as did the master controls for the general warming-up prior to landing. The landing itself would be the responsibility of the original crew, but they would not be warmed until everything was ready for them.

  The feelings of Captain Heglenni and her trainee crew towards the deep-sleeping bodies of Captain Gunt, Astrogator Gerrol, and the others were somewhat mixed. They felt a respect close to religious awe for these legendary beings who had actually lived and gone through their training on Untha itself, but there was also a feeling that came very close to being one of dislike.

  Heglenni felt ashamed of this feeling. Yet, at the same time she could not help remembering that Captain Gunt had cooled himself, leaving the original Deslann and Hellahar with a terrible problem to solve. When she would return the command of the flagship and the fleet to Captain Gunt, the solution to that terrible problem, she was determined, should be as complete as possible in every detail. The answer had cost so much in time and suffering and often violent death that she felt it only right that Gunt should be made to feel a little bit ashamed.

  From the moment when his brain had thawed sufficiently to allow the electrochemical processes of thought to proceed normally, the newly warmed Captain Gunt had been bombarded by reports. To begin with there had been the data in the captain's log, the more detailed information relayed via Gerrol regarding Deslann's proposed solution, and the other captain's final personal message to him, and then had come the highly compressed history in the form of a report by the female Captain Heglenni, whose mere presence was proof that Deslann's solution had worked, had just reached its shattering conclusion.

  There was a quality of madness about the whole situation, Gunt thought wildly: the familiar rendered frightening by a touch of the strange, the good wrecked by the bad, and joy flowing too closely to despair. The psychologists had spoken warningly about vacillation of feelings like this!

  Gerrol insisted that the few errors committed on the ship had been sociological rather than technical -- for the computer room around them blazed with ready signals and the navigation and course corrections of the flagship and fleet had been performed with great efficiency, although the atmosphere of the room, whose water had been recycled for nearly sixteen generations, had become unpleasant to the point of nausea. The few sociological, and no doubt unavoidable, errors had begun with the catastrophic rule of Helltag the Mad and the split that left half the flagship's crew no choice but to transfer to the nearby food ship. The severity of the punishments given out to the heretics who had defied the first Deslann's edict against warming other cold-sleeping Unthans, and the war between Deslann Five and Hellseggorn of the food ship, which had given the flagship a desperately needed reserve of non-sterile males, were further errors. The generations, too, of increasingly psychotic and physically malformed crew people, the sickness and suffering and often needless deaths were all a product of these errors, as was this small, lean, angry female captain.

  She w
as waiting for him to speak.

  "We have arrived safely at the target system," Gunt said stupidly. "It should be a time of great joy. Are you sure that . . . that -- "

  He broke off, thinking that since Heglenni had first begun her report he had been trying desperately to see some tiny resemblance to Deslann and Hellahar in this female, but in vain. If anything she reminded him of some of the early predators who had been hunted and starved out of existence when civilization had been spreading through the seas of Untha. They also had been thin, stunted, diseased, and savage.

  "The telescope will fall ahead of us once thrust is applied," said Heglenni impatiently. "If you distrust my data there is still time to view the planet directly instead of studying my photographs."

  "I trust your data," said Gunt dully. "The news has come as a shock to me. I was thinking aloud and perhaps hoping for a miracle."

  The other captain's expression softened briefly, and for a moment Gunt thought he saw a little of Healer Hellahar's compassion and Deslann's dedication show through, then she went on, "I understand your feelings of shock and disappointment, since I share them myself, sir. The target system has been reached safely and the problem you set Captain Deslann has been solved. But the target world is inhabited more so than it was centuries ago when our original pictures were taken, when there was no evidence of widespread mechanization or road systems. It has become densely populated by an intelligent, gas-breathing form of life sufficiently advanced to cross interplanetary space. There are bases on the target planet's moon and on the dehydrated fourth planet, also strong indications of bases on the moons of the inner gas giant, planet Five. I myself can conceive of no solution to this problem nor can any of my crew, so I'm passing responsibility back to you, sir."

  Neither captain spoke for a long time after that. Then, slowly Captain Gunt performed the gesture of respect between equals and said formally, "I hereby relieve you of the command of this ship."

  XX

  The target world continued to circle her parent sun, a planet of great beauty and serenity whose peace was now actual as well as apparent. The closest and most detailed examination showed no evidence of war, the few smoke palls on the dayside being the by-product of industry, while on the nightside the cities blazed only with street lights and advertising. There was still a great deal of suffering and death, but this was in distressed areas like India and China where there was, as there always had been, a shortage of food. And in a tiny bay on the southwest coast of Spain, cut off from land and sea alike by high cliffs and reefs which were thought to be. impassable, in two hundred feet of water there lay a distressed area nobody knew about.

  Commander James Eichlan Wallis of Gulf Trader (he had been elected commander as well as ship's doctor because of his seniority and a recent tendency, shared by the very first commander and all who had followed him to worry much more than was normal about the future) was lecturing on the evils of marriage.

  "There was a time in the not too distant past," he was saying in the bitter, sarcastic tones which had become second nature to him these days, "when marriage was considered a necessary evil. And a time before that, the Game tells us, when it was not considered evil at all but a necessity for a stable and happy existence. That happy state of affairs no longer obtains. Now if a man likes a girl, or vice versa, there is danger. For him to make love to her is nothing short of criminal insanity, the ultimate in selfishness and deliberate murder!"

  "Let's change the subject, sir," said Heather May Dickson, in a voice both respectful and impatient. Her twin sister's voice was merely impatient as she said, "You've told us about childbirth before, Doctor, many times -- "

  "And I'll tell you again!" Wallis snapped. He went on, "We lack medical facilities, food, clothing, and proper living conditions for both mother and child. The cold and damp has worsened steadily over the past few years, with the result that all of you young people have heart conditions and lung conditions which would be considered grave in a normal, well-fed, and clothed person who was not being subjected to any physical strain. You are not well fed. You are shockingly deficient in certain vitamins and your resistance to disease or infection is practically nonexistent -- and this is in relation to conditions within the ship only ten years ago, not the physical norm which my medical knowledge describes! Neither of you girls could survive a pregnancy, and for a baby to survive in the present living conditions would be likewise impossible. This is fact, not supposition. There are only seven of us left and we can't afford to lose anyone else -- "

  "If we don't marry we won't gain anyone, either," someone said sotto voce. It sounded like Henry Joe-Jim Dickson. The four young people laughed, but not the seniors.

  The doctor said furiously, "I have in mind a modification to the Game. The idea is that instead of recalling and re-enacting scenes from Hornblower or landings on alien planets, we delve into something a little closer to home: the memories of your fathers and myself, for instance, of the period immediately preceding and following your births.

  "Myself, I can remember this material quite vividly," the doctor went on harshly, "even without the mental discipline of the Game. I could recall the complete medical situation as well as describe the incidental sights and, uh, sounds. Your fathers' memories will also be clear in this period, since they became widowed within a few minutes of your being born. . . ."

  He had meant to shock some sense into them and the silence that followed his threat showed he might have succeeded. The other two seniors were not a problem: they were trying hard to forget the manner in which their respective wives had died. On the other hand, the twin girls and the two young men, sixteen and nineteen years old, had not been there at the time so far as memory was concerned, so they were a problem. Warnings continually repeated tended to lose their meaning; they became, instead, tiresome rather than frightening. So the doctor was threatening in order to bring home to everyone the full, terrible meaning behind his warnings, and was using the Game to do it.

  It was only a threat, of course. The thought of his ever having to put it into effect was enough to make Doctor Wallis himself start to shake.

  The Game was not only sacred, it was as much a part of life in the ship as eating and breathing. During the Game life became tolerable, and even exciting and happy. It allowed them to forget the short period of nightmare each day when they walked barefoot over cold metal harsh with rust, shivering in the scraps of hair and plant fiber they called clothing.

  They could forget the generator, now more a means of keeping warm than a device for supplying light, and the garden which, with insufficient light and no heat at all, barely kept itself alive. It allowed them to forget the food, still inadequate despite their having overcome theit repugnance at eating the fish caught in Richard's Hole, and the damp, frigid air which tied up their muscles and joints with rheumatism and fibrositis and made their heads pound with the pain of inflamed sinuses and neuralgia and toothache. The Game allowed them to forget their shivering, wasted, and diseased bodies in the hard and sustained exercise of their minds -- minds which, although they had no way of knowing it, were in many respects the keenest and most highly developed on the whole planet. That their wonderful Game should be used to remember all the things they were trying so desperately to forget was the ultimate sacrilege, an idea so perverted and horrifying that it should have been unthinkable.

  But the doctor had thought of it because something drastic in the way of warnings was needed to keep the young people from mating. On the whole, life in Gulf Trader was bearable, and providing there were no more deaths in childbirth or similar disasters, morale would remain good. They were having an unusually cold and, judging by the agitated state of the surface above them, very stormy winter. Conditions were bound to improve soon. They could hardly get any worse.

  Well above the plane of the ecliptic and on the point of passing within the orbit of the system's inner gas giant, the leading elements of the Unthan fleet were decelerating and converging on the target wo
rld. Far behind them on the outermost fringe of the system, from where the sun appeared only as an unusually bright star, the main body of the fleet also decelerated and slowly converged. In the flagship most of the major decisions had already been taken, but there was discussion, argument, and recrimination regarding them.

  "I agree that it is unfortunate they have attained such a high degree of civilization," Gunt was saying angrily. "If they had been backward we could simply have landed in their oceans and taken our time over making contact. With luck there might have been peaceful coexistence between us. As it is, what we are doing is bound to appear as an act of war, a large-scale invasion, and they are bound to react to it as such. Even if we had the fuel reserves to put the fleet into orbit while we tried to communicate with them, I doubt very much whether we could convince them of our peaceful intentions in the presence of such a multitude of ships!"

  "It is their planet, sir," said Gerrol.

  "We don't want all of it," one of the engineers joined in. "Just the oceans, and they don't use them for anything but floating boats on."