Non-Stop

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘The twenty-sixth amino acid disrupts this sequence. It combines into too complex a protein for any system – vegetable or animal – to handle. This is the point at which rigidity of the limbs sets in and the virus proliferates. As Payne explained, the denser peptic linkage may partially be due to the heavier gravity of New Earth; we know very little about the sustained effects of gravity on viral development or free-building molecules.

  ‘By now, the settlement on the new world must be in as sad a state as we. At least they have the privilege of dying in the open air.

  ‘22.xii.2221. I had no time to finish yesterday. Today there seems to be all the time in the world. Fourteen more deaths reported this morning by a tired Toynbee. The Nine Day Ague is undisputed master of the ship: my dear Yvonne is its latest victim. I have tucked her in bed but cannot look at her – too terrible. I have ceased to pray.

  ‘Let me finish what young Besti told me. She was guardedly optimistic about the ultimate survival of a percentage of our population. The bodies of Ague victims are inactive while their internal forces cope with viral depredations; they will eventually break them down if the constitution concerned is elastic enough: “another little virus won’t do us any harm”, Miss Besti pertly quotes. Proteins are present already in all living cells and, after a danger period, another protein, differing but slightly, may be tolerated. The new amino, christened bestine (this bright young creature smoothly informs me!), has been isolated; like leucine and lysine, which are already known, it has an effect on growth – what effect, only long-term research will establish, and I doubt that we have that much time.

  ‘The short-term results are before us. The plants have mainly adapted to bestine and, once adapted, seem to thrive. The animals, varying with their species, have adapted, though only the pig colony actually seems exhuberant. All survivals, Besti says, may be regarded as mutations – what she calls “low-level mutations”. It seems the heat in Agriculture may have helped them; so I have ordered a ten degree temperature increase from Inboard Power for the whole ship. That is literally the only step we have been able to take to help . . .

  ‘It looks as if the more complex the organism, the more difficulty it has in rejecting to the new proteins and viruses. Bad luck on man: in particular, us.

  ‘24.xii.2221. Toynbee has the Ague. So has Montgomery. They are two of only five new victims this morning. The freak proteins seem to have done the worst of their work. Trying to analyse the reports Sick Bay still heroically send in, I find that the older the person, the better he holds out to begin with and the less chance he stands of surviving once the virus develops. I asked Besti about this when she came, quite voluntarily, to see me (she has made herself I/C Research, and I can only bless her efficiency); she thinks the figures are not significant – the young survive most things better than older people.

  ‘Little Sheila Pesoli has recovered! Hers was one of the first cases, sixteen long days ago. I went down and saw her; she seems perfectly all right, although quick and nervous in her actions. Temperature still high. Still, she is our first cure.

  ‘Feel absurdly optimistic about this. If only 100 men and women came through, they might multiply, and their descendants get the ship home. Is there not a lower limit to the number who can avoid extinction? No doubt the answer lurks somewhere in the library, perhaps among those dreary disks compiled by past occupants of this ship . . .

  ‘There was a mutiny today, a stupid affair, led by a Sergeant Tugsten of Ship’s Police and “Spud” Murphy, the surviving armourer. They ran amok with the few hand-atomic weapons not landed on P.V., killing six of their companions and causing severe damage amidships. Strangely enough, they weren’t after me! I had them disarmed and thrown into the brig – it will give Bassitt someone to preach at. And all weapons apart from the neurolethea, or “dazers” as they are popularly called, have been collected and destroyed, to prevent further menace to the ship; the “dazers”, acting only on living nervous systems, have no effect on inorganic material.

  ‘25.xii.2221. Another attempt at mutiny. I was down in Agriculture when it all blew up. As one of the essential ship’s services, the farm must be kept running at all costs. The oxygenators in Hydroponics have been left, as they can manage themselves; one of them, the dry variety mentioned before, has proliferated over the floor and seems almost as if it could sustain itself. While I was looking at it, “Noah” Stover came in with a “dazer”, a lot of worried young women with him. He fired a mild charge at me.

  ‘When I revived, they had carried me up into the Control Room, there threatening me with death if I did not turn the ship round and head back for New Earth! It took some time to make them understand that the manoeuvre of deflecting the ship through 180 degrees when it is travelling at its present speed of roughly 1328.5 times EV (Earth) would take about five years. Finally, by demonstrating stream factors, I made them understand; then they were so frustrated they were going to kill me anyhow.

  ‘Who saved me? Not my other officers, I regret to tell, but June Besti, single-handed – my little heroine from Research! So furiously did she rant at them, that they finally slunk off, Noah in the lead. I can hear them now, rampaging round the low-number decks. They’ve got at the liquor supplies.

  ‘26.xii.2221. We have now what may be termed six complete recoveries, including Sheila. They all have temperatures and act with nervous speed, but claim to feel fit; mercifully, they have no memory of any pain they underwent. Meanwhile, the Ague still claims its victims. Reports from Sick Bay have ceased to come in, but I estimate that under fifty people are still in action. Fifty! Their – my – time of immunity is fast running out. Ultimately, there can be no avoiding the protein pile-up, but since the freak linkages are random factors, some of us dodge a critical congestion in our tissues longer than others.

  ‘So at least says June Besti. She has been with me again; of course I am grateful fof her help. And I suppose I am lonely. I found myself kissing her passionately; she is physically attractive, and about fifteen years my junior. It was all foolishness on my part. She said – oh, the old argument needs no repeating – she was alone, frightened, we had so little time, why did we not make love together? I dismissed her, my sudden anger an indication of how she tempted me; now I’m sorry I was so abrupt – it was just that I kept thinking of Yvonne, stretched out in dumb suffering a few yards away in the next room.

  ‘Must arm myself and make some sort of inspection of the ship tomorrow.

  ‘27.xii.2221. Found two junior officers, John Hall and Margaret Prestellan, to accompany me round ship. Men very orderly. Noah running a nursing service to feed those who come out of the Nine Day Ague. What will the long term repercussions of this catastrophe be?

  ‘Someone has let Bassitt loose. He is raving mad – and yet compelling. I could almost believe his teaching myself. In this morgue, it is easier to put faith in psycho-analysis than God.

  ‘We went down to Agriculture. It’s a shambles, the livestock loose among the crops. And the hydroponics! The dry oxygenator mentioned here before has wildly mutated under the bestine influence. It has invaded the corridors near the Hydroponics section, its root system sweeping a supply of soil before it, almost as if the plant had developed an intelligence of its own. With somewhat absurd visions of the thing growing and choking the whole ship, I went up to the Control Room and clicked the button which causes the inter-deck doors to close all along Main Corridor. That should cramp the plant’s style.

  ‘Frank broke out of his stiffness today. He did not recognize me; I will see him again tomorrow.

  ‘June was taken with the Ague today. Bright and living June! Prestellan showed her to me – motionless in suffering even as she had predicted. Somehow, treacherously, the sight of her hurt me more than the sight of Yvonne had done. I wish – but what does it matter what I wish? MY TURN NEXT.

  ‘28.xii.2221. Prestellan reminded me that Christmas has come and gone; I had forgotten that mockery. That was what the drunken mutineers were celeb
rating, poor devils!

  ‘Frank recognized me today; I could tell by his eyes, although he could not speak. If he ever becomes Captain, it will be of a very different ship.

  ‘Twenty recoveries to date. An improvement – room for hope.

  ‘Adversity makes thinkers of us all. Only now, when the long journey means no more than a retreat into darkness, do I begin to question the sanity behind the whole conception of inter-stellar travel. How many hapless men and women must have questioned it on the way out to Procyon, imprisoned in these eternal walls! For the sake of that grandiose idea, their lives guttered uselessly, as many more must do before our descendants step on Earth again. Earth! I pray that there men’s hearts have changed, grown less like the hard metals they have loved and served so long. Nothing but the full flowering of a technological age, such as the Twenty-first Century knew, could have launched this miraculous ship; yet the miracle is sterile, cruel. Only a technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.

  ‘At the beginning of the technological age – a fitting token, to my mind – stands the memory of Auschwitz-Berkenau; what can we do but hope that this more protracted agony stands at its end: its end for ever, on Earth, and on the new world of Procyon V.’

  There the file ended.

  During the reading of it, Vyann had been forced to pause several times and master her voice. Her usual rather military bearing had deserted her, leaving her just a girl on a bed, close to tears. And when she had finished reading, she forced herself to turn back and re-read a sentence on the first page which had escaped Complain’s notice. Captain Gregory Complain had printed: ‘We head for Earth in the knowledge that the men who will see those skies will not be born until six generations have died.’ Vyann read it aloud in a shaky voice before finally breaking into a storm of tears.

  ‘Don’t you see!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Roy – the Journey was only meant to take seven generations! And we are the twenty-third generation! The twenty-third! We must be far past Earth – nothing can ever save us now.’

  Hopelessly, wordlessly, Complain tried to console her, but human love had no power to soften the inhumanity of the trap they were in. At last, when Vyann’s sobbing had partly subsided, Complain began to talk. He could hear his voice creaking with numbness, forced out in an attempt to distract her – to distract both of them – from the basic plight.

  ‘This file explains so much, Laur,’ he said. ‘We must try and be grateful for knowing. Above all, it explains the catastrophe; it’s not a frightening legend any more, it’s something we might be able to deal with. Perhaps we shall never know if Captain Gregory survived, but his son must have done, to carry on the name. Perhaps June Besti survived – somehow she reminds me of you . . . At least it’s obvious enough people survived – little groups, forming tribes . . . And by then the hydroponics had almost filled the ship.’

  ‘Who would have thought,’ she whispered, ‘that the ponics weren’t really meant to be there. They’re . . . they’re part of the natural order of things! It seems so –’

  ‘Laur! Laur!’ he exclaimed, suddenly interrupting. He sat up and seized the strange weapon his brother had given him. ‘This weapon! The diary said all weapons except dazers had been destroyed. So this thing must be something other than a weapon!’

  ‘Perhaps they missed one,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It’s a heat device. It must have a special use. It must be able to do something we don’t know about. Let me try it –’

  ‘Roy! Be careful!’ Vyann cried. ‘You’ll have a fire!’

  ‘I’ll try it on something that doesn’t burn. We’re on to something, Laur, I swear it!’

  He picked the gun up carefully, training the nozzle towards the wall; it had an indicator and a button on the smooth top surface. He pressed the button, as Gregg had done earlier. A narrow fan of intense heat, almost invisible, splayed out and touched the wall. On the matt metal of the wall, a bright line appeared. It loosened, widened. Two cherry-red lips grew, parting in a smile. Hastily, Complain pressed the button again. The laser died, the lips lost their colour, turned maroon, hardened into a gaping black mouth; through it, they could see the corridor.

  Vyann and Complain stared at each other, thunderstruck.

  ‘We must tell the Council,’ Complain said finally, in an awed voice.

  ‘Wait!’ she said. ‘Roy, darling, there’s somewhere I want us to try that weapon. Will you come with me before we say a word to anyone?’

  They found, with some surprise, when they got into the corridors, that the hunt for the Giant was still on. It was fast approaching the time when the darkness that would cover the next sleep-wake fell; everyone not engaged in the hunt was preparing for sleep, behind closed doors. The ship seemed deserted, looking as it must have looked long ago, when half its occupants lay dying under the rule of the Nine Day Ague. Vyann and Complain hurried along unnoticed. When the dark came down, the girl flashed on the torch at her belt without comment.

  Complain could only admire her refusal to admit defeat; he was not enough of a self-analyst to see it was a quality he had a fair measure of himself. The uneasy notion that they might meet rats or Giants or Outsiders, or a combination of all three, obsessed him, and he kept the heat gun ready in one hand and his dazer in the other. But their progress was uneventful, and they came safely to Deck 1 and the closed spiral staircase.

  ‘According to your friend Marapper’s plan,’ Vyann said, ‘the Control Room should be at the top of these stairs. On the plan, the Control Room is shown large: yet at the top there is only a small room with featureless circular walls. Supposing those walls have been put up to keep people out of the Control Room?’

  ‘You mean – by Captain Gregory?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Probably by someone later,’ she said. ‘Come and aim your gun at the walls . . .’

  They climbed the enclosed stairs and faced the circle of metal walls, with a hushed sensation of confronting a mystery. Vyann’s grip on his arm was painfully tight.

  ‘Try there!’ she whispered, pointing at random.

  She switched her torch off as he switched the gun on.

  In the dark, beyond the levelled nozzle, a ruddy glow was born, woke to brightness, moved under Complain’s control until it formed a radiant square. Rapidly, the sides of square sagged; the metal within it peeled back like a piece of skin, leaving them room to climb through. An acrid smell in their nostrils, the two waited impatiently for the heat to subside. Beyond it, in a great chamber dimly revealed, they could see a narrow outline of something, something indefinable because beyond their experience.

  When the square was cool enough to climb through, they made by common consent for that beckoning line.

  The great shutters which, when closed, covered the magnificent 270 degree sweep of the observation blister, were exactly as Captain Gregory Complain had left them long since, even down to a carelessly abandoned spanner whose positioning on a sill prevented one panel of shutter from closing properly. It was the gap between this panel and its neighbour which drew Complain and the girl, as surely as ponics seek the light.

  Through the narrow chink, which continued almost from ground level to far above their heads, they could glimpse a ribbon of space. How many pointless years had passed since the last inhabitant of the ship had looked out at that mighty void? Heads together, Complain and the girl stared through the impervious hyaline tungsten of the window, trying to take in what they saw. Little, of course, could be seen, just a tiny wedge of universe with its due proportion of stars – not enough to dizzy them, only enough to fill them with courage and hope.

  ‘What does it matter if the ship is past Earth?’ Vyann breathed. ‘We have found the controls! When we have learnt how to use them, we can steer the ship down to the first planets we come to – Tregonnin told us most suns have planets. Oh, we can do it! I know we can! After this, the rest will be easy!’

>   In the faint, faint light, she saw a far-off gleam in Complain’s eye, a look of dumb-struck speculation. She put her arms round him, suddenly anxious to protect him as she had always protected Scoyt; for the independence so unremittingly fostered in Quarters had momentarily left Complain.

  ‘For the first time,’ he said, ‘I’ve realized – fully realized, right down inside me – that we are on a ship.’ His legs were like water.

  It was as if she interpreted the words as a personal challenge.

  ‘Your ancestor brought the ship from New Earth,’ she said. ‘You shall land it on a Newer Earth!’

  And she flicked on her torch and swung its beam eagerly round the great array of controls, which up till now had remained in darkness. The phalanx on phalanx of dials which had once made this chamber the nerve centre of the ship, the array of toggles, the soldier-like parade of indicators, levers, knobs and screens, which together provided the outward signs of the power still throbbing through the ship, had coagulated into a lava-like mess. On all sides, the boards of instruments resembled, and were as much use as, damp sherbet. Nothing had been left unmolested; though the torch beam flitted here and there with increasing pace, it picked out not a switch intact. The controls were utterly destroyed.

  PART IV

  THE BIG SOMETHING

  I

  Only the occasional stale glow of a pilot light illuminated the coiled miles of corridor. At one end of the ship, the ponics were begining to collapse on to themselves in the death each dark sleep-wake inevitably brought; at the other end of the ship, Master Scoyt still drove his men in a torch-light search for the Giant. Scoyt’s party, working along the lower levels of the Drive Floors, had drained the twenties decks of Forwards almost clear of life.