by Brian Aldiss
‘Come on!’ Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the wreckage towards one of two doors. ‘Let’s not waste time here.’
The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the laser and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their torch beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.
‘No sign of life . . .’ Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of unease.
They stood in a side corridor, sealed off from the rest of the ship, entombed, scattering their torchlight about convulsively. It was so achingly hot they could hardly see over their cheek bones.
One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice was stencilled. Crowding together, they shuffled to read what it said:
DUTYMEN ONLY CARGO HATCH – AIR LOCK
DANGER!
A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN UNTIL YOU GET THE SIGNAL’. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.
‘What are you doing – waiting to get a signal?’ Hawl grated at them. ‘Melt the door down, Captain!’
‘Wait!’ Scoyt said. ‘We ought to be careful here. What’s an air lock, I’d like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks, but what’s an air lock?’
‘Never mind what it is. Melt it down!’ Hawl repeated, waggling his grotesque head. ‘It’s your lousy ship, Captain – make yourself at home!’
Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.
‘Must be special metal,’ he said.
One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone laughed sharply at the slackening of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed. They were free to move into the cargo air lock.
Instead of moving, they stood pixilated by a stream of light which beat remorselessly upon them. The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window looking into space.
This was not the meagre pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained rooted in the entrance.
Beyond the window, with stars tossed prodigiously into it like jewels into an emperor’s sack, roared the unending stillness of space. It was something beyond the comprehension to gaze upon, the mightiest paradox of all, for although it gave an impression of unyielding blackness, every last pocket of it glistened with multi-coloured pangs of light.
Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.
Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright blind blue as a new-born kitten’s eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm’s length. It scintillated into dazzling white at its centre, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.
Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the miracle of it. They were struck dumb, deaf and dizzy by its sublimity.
At last it was Vyann who spoke.
‘Oh, Roy darling,’ she whispered. ‘We have arrived somewhere, after all! There’s still a hope for us, there’s still some sort of a hope.’
Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something was he had wanted all his life.
It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was just to see Laur’s face – by sunlight.
III
Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to every man, woman and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident was a mere irrelevance, almost a set-back in the priority task of hunting down the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a cat-nap and some food, he proceeded to put into action.
The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going entirely to dismantle Deck 25.
Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it, and you would have a perfect no-man’s-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a hunt could be started down all the inspection ways and the Giants would be unable to escape.
Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt’s aid, willing to do anything they could to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain, sweating warriors, many of them Gregg’s men, who had experience of such tasks, attacked the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the clearance men, looting, gutting and filleting the place.
And so as soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat gun, blazing round the sides of the walls till the walls came tumbling down; they were carted off directly they were cool enough to touch. The laser did not melt the plastic which actually divided deck from deck – that metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air lock doors were built, something extra tough – but everything else fell away before it.
Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room marked ‘Laundry’. Splitting open a boiler, two of Gregg’s men revealed a crazy little maze of rat buildings, a rodent village. Different levels and flights of a bewildering complexity of design had been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth. There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters, rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and there were the rats, in nurseries and studs and armouries and slaughter houses. As Scoyt thrust the heat gun into the miniature city and it crackled up in flames, the rodents poured out savagely, leaping to the attack.
Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back. Gregg’s two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along the human chain, and demolition continued.
By now, the corridors of decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of trap-doors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.
‘The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable,’ Councillor Tregonnin protested. ‘This is destroying for destroying’s sake.’
He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin were present. Pagwam and other officers of the Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac Deight were missing.
By the messengers which had been despatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt had sent back word that he was ‘too busy’. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin’s request to fetch up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight’s sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor – but might there not be other traitors here, whom it would be wiser not to warn?
‘The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,’ Hawl shouted. ‘That’s obvio
us enough; why make an issue of it?’
‘You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled apart!’ Councillor Dupont protested.
‘It would get rid of the rats, anyway,’ Hawl said, and cackled with laughter.
Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the members of the Council; neither side liked the other’s manners. The meeting was disorganized for another reason: nobody could decide whether they wanted most to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange planet.
At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the situation.
‘What it amounts to’, he said, ‘is this. Scoyt’s policy can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be captured but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship down on to the surface of this planet.’
There was a general murmur of agreement at this.
‘Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge,’ Billyoe said, ‘since they built the ship in the first place.’
‘Then let’s get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some support,’ Gregg said, standing up.
‘There is just one other thing I would like to say before you go,’ Tregonnin said, ‘and that is, that our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth.’
The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.
Complain’s voice cut through the uproar.
‘The planet is not Earth!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We must be far away from Earth – twenty-three generations have passed on this ship: Earth should have been reached in seven!’
He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful and demanding.
He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation exactly as it was; they must be told everything – about the ruined controls, about Captain Gregory Complain’s journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told everything – the problem had grown far too urgent for any one man to cope with it. But before he could utter another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood there, faces distorted with fear.
‘The Giants are attacking!’ they shouted.
Stinking, blinding, smoke coiled through the decks of Forwards. The piled rubbish evacuated from Deck 25 on to Decks 24 and 23 had been set alight. Nobody cared; everyone was suddenly a pyromaniac. Automatic devices throughout most of the ship had a simple way of coping with outbreaks of fire: they closed off the room in which the fire began and exhausted the air from it. Unluckily, this fire was started in a room where the devices had failed, and in the open corridors.
Scoyt and his fellow destroyers worked on uncomplainingly in the smoke. An impartial observer, seeing these men, would have known that an inner fury possessed them; that a life-long hatred of the ship which imprisoned them had at last found expression and was working itself out with uncheckable force.
The Giants struck cleverly.
Scoyt had just burnt round one wall of a small washroom and was resting while three of his men removed the wall, so that it shielded him momentarily from the view of the others. At that instant, the grille overhead was whipped away, and a Giant fired a gas pellet at Scoyt. It caught the Master in the face. He collapsed without a sound.
A cord ladder snaked down from the grille. One of the Giants skipped down it and seized the heat gun from Scoyt’s limp grasp. As he did so, the severed wall toppled over on top of him and stunned him: the three handlers had been careless and did not mean to let it go. They stared in utter surprise at the Giant. As they did so, three more Giants dropped down the ladder, fired at them, picked up their mate and the heat gun and attempted to get back to safety.
Despite the smoke, other people had seen this foray. One of Gregg’s ablest assassins, a fellow called Black, sprang forward. The hindmost Giant, who had just reached the grille, came crashing down again with a knife stuck in his back; the heat gun rolled from his grasp. Shouting for assistance, Black retrieved his knife and bounded up the ladder. He, too, fell back to the floor with a face full of gas. Others were behind him. Jumping him, they pressed on, swarming up the ladder and through the grille.
Then began a terrific running fight in the cramped space of the inspection ways. The Giants had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection way proper, but were hampered in their retreat by their injured companion. Reinforcements arrived for them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain. Meanwhile, round pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in increasing numbers.
It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection ways ran round every level and between each deck. They were unlit; the torches which now erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was hell: friend could no longer be told from foe.
At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the Forwarders obeyed him now Scoyt was temporarily out of action.
‘Somebody bring me that heat gun,’ he bellowed. ‘Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear.’
It was an excellent idea. The only drawback – and it explained how the Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of all trap-doors – was that the inspection ways extended right round the circumference of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper levels. Until this was realized, the Giants’ movements could never be blocked. The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming wildly down the trap-doors, could not find the enemy.
Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.
Never before had the inspection ways been open to the inhabitants of the ship; never before had a madly brandished laser played among all those delicate capillaries of the vessel.
Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.
‘Switch that thing off, you crazy loon!’ one of the Forwards men, sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.
For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.
A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live wire flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died without a chirp.
The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into being. Nothing so quickly produces panic as the sensation of falling. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist . . .
During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.
He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt’s hair: he could also smell burning. A glance upwards showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the overhead grilles.
‘That fire the fools started two decks down – the air duct system is going to carry the smoke everywhere!’ he exclaimed to Vyann. ‘It ought to be stopped.’
; ‘If we could only close the inter-deck doors . . .’ she said. ‘Ought we to get Roger out of here?’
Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.
‘Mutiny!’ he said. ‘Mutiny! I feared as much. Oh hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that that Deadways gang should never be allowed in here. Can’t you rouse Scoyt? He’d know what to do! I’m not supposed to be a man of action.’
Complain fixed him with a surly eye. The little librarian was almost dancing on his toes, his face gawky with excitement.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked.
With a visible effort, Tregonnin pulled himself up before that contemptuous stare.
‘The ship is being wrecked,’ he said, more steadily. ‘That madman Hawl – the fellow with the little head – has the heat gun. Your brother was injured. Now most of his gang – and many of our men – are simply pulling everywhere to bits. I ordered them to stop and surrender the gun, but they just laughed at me.’
‘They’ll obey Scoyt,’ Complain said grimly. He began shaking Scoyt insistently.
‘I’m afraid, Roy. I can’t help feeling something terrible is going to happen,’ Vyann said.
One glance at her face told Complain how worried she was. He stood up beside her, stroking her upper arm.
‘Keep working on Master Scoyt, Councillor,’ he told Tregonnin. ‘He’ll soon be lively enough to solve all your problems for you. We’ll be back.’
He hustled a surprised Vyann out into the corridor. A thin dribble of water crept along the deck, dripping into the manholes.
‘Now what?’ she asked him.
‘I was a fool not to think of this before,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to risk pulling the place down about our heads to get to the Giants – unless there is another way. And there is another way. Zac Deight has an instrument in his room by which he spoke to Curtis, the Giants’ leader.’