by Damon Knight
There was one possibility which Tommy, who, in most circumstances, would try anything, hated to think about. Fuel lines—tubes carrying the rushing, radiant ion vapour that powered the ship—adjoined many of these corridors, and it was certain that if he dared to enter one, he would be perfectly safe from detection as long as he remained in it. But, for one thing, these lines radiated from the ship’s axis and none of them would take him where he wanted to go. For another, they were the most dangerous places aboard ship. Older crew members sometimes entered them to make emergency repairs, but they got out as quickly as they could. Tommy did not know how long he could survive there; he had an unpleasant conviction that it would not be long.
Only a few yards up the corridor was the sealed sphincter which gave entrance to such a tube. Tommy looked at it indecisively as the motion of the scanning waves brought him nearer. He had still not made up his mind when he caught a flicker reflected around the curve of the corridor behind him.
Tommy squeezed himself closer to the wall and watched the other end of the corridor approach with agonizing slowness. If he could only get around that corner…
The flicker of motion was repeated, and then he saw a thin rind of green poke into view. There was no more time to consider entering the fuel line, no time to let the scanning waves” movement carry him around the corner. Tommy put on full speed, cutting across the next wave and down the cross-corridor ahead.
Instantly the Captain’s voice shouted from the wall, “Ah! Was that him, the dirty scut? After him, lads!”
Tommy glanced behind as he turned another corner, and his heart sank. It was no cabin boy who was behind him, or even an Ordinary, but a Third Mate—so huge that he filled nearly half the width of the corridor, and so powerful that Tommy, in comparison, was like a boy on a bicycle racing an express train.
He turned another corner, realizing in that instant that he was as good as caught: the new corridor ahead of him stretched straight and without a break for three hundred yards. As he flashed down it, the hulk of the Mate appeared around the bend behind.
The Mate was coming up with terrifying speed, and Tommy had time for only one last desperate burst. Then the other body slammed with stunning force against his, and he was held fast.
As they coasted to a halt, the Captain’s voice rumbled from the wall. “That’s it, Mister. Hold him where I can see him!”
The scanning areas were stationary now. The Mate moved Tommy forward until he was squarely in range of the nearest.
Tommy squirmed futilely. The Captain said, “There’s our little jokester. It’s a pure pleasure to see you again, Tommy. What—no witty remarks? Your humour all dried up?”
Tommy gasped, “Hope you enjoyed your nap, Captain.”
“Very good,” said the Captain with heavy sarcasm. “Oh very entertaining, Tommy. Now would you have anything more to say, before I put the whips to you?”
Tommy was silent.
The Captain said to the Mate, “Nice work, Mister. You’ll get extra rations for this.”
The Mate spoke for the first time, and Tommy recognized his high, affected voice. It was George Adkins, who had recently spored and was so proud of the new life inside his body that there was no living with him. George said prissily, “Thank you, sir, I’m sure. Of course, I really shouldn’t have exerted myself the way I just did, in my state.”
“Well, you’ll be compensated for it,” the Captain said testily. “Now take the humorist down to Assembly Five. We’ll have a little ceremony there.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Mate distantly. He moved off, shoving Tommy ahead of him, and dived into the first turning that led downward.
They moved along in silence for the better part of a mile, crossing from one lesser passage to another until they reached a main artery that led directly to the centre of the ship. The scanning waves were still stationary, and they were moving so swiftly that there was no danger of being overheard. Tommy said politely, “You won’t let them be too hard on me, will you, sir?”
The Mate did not reply for a moment. He had been baited by Tommy’s mock courtesy before, and he was as wary as his limited intelligence allowed. Finally he said, “You’ll get no more than what’s coming to you, young Tom.”
“Yes, sir. I know that, sir. I’m sorry I made you exert yourself, sir, in your condition and all.”
“You should be,” said the Mate stiffly,but his voice betrayed his pleasure. It was seldom enough that even a cabin boy showed a decent interest in the Mate’s prospective parenthood. “They’re moving about, you know,” he added, unbending a little.
“Are they, sir? Oh, you must be careful of yourself, sir. How many are there, please, sir?”
“Twenty-eight,” said the Mate, as he had on every possible occasion for the past two weeks. “Strong and healthy—so far.”
“That’s remarkable, sir!” cried Tommy. “Twenty-eight! If I might be so bold, sir, you ought to be careful of what you eat. Is the Captain going to give you your extra rations out of that mass he just brought in topside, sir?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Gosh!” exclaimed Tommy. “I wish I could be sure…”
He let the pause grow. Finally the Mate said querulously,
“What do you mean? Is there anything wrong with the metal?”
“I don’t really know, sir, but it isn’t like any we ever had before. That is,” Tommy added, “since I was spored, sir.”
“Naturally,” said the Mate. “I’ve eaten all kinds myself, you know.”
“Yes, sir. But doesn’t it usually come in ragged shapes, sir, and darkish?”
“Of course it does. Everybody knows that. Metal is nonliving, and only living things have regular shapes.”
“Yes, sir. But I was topside, sir, while I was trying to get away, and I saw this metal. It’s quite regular, except for some knobs at one end, sir, and it’s as smooth as you are, sir, and shiny. If you’ll forgive me, sir, it didn’t look at all appetizing to me.”
“Nonsense,” said the Mate uncertainly. “Nonsense,” he repeated, in a stronger tone. “You must have been mistaken. Metal can’t be alive.”
“That’s just what I thought, sir,” said Tommy excitedly. “But there are live things in this metal, sir. I saw them. And metal wasn’t just floating along the way it’s supposed to, sir. I saw it when the Captain brought it down, and… But I’m afraid you’ll think I’m lying, sir, if I tell you what it was doing.”
“Well, what was it doing?”
“I swear I saw it, sir,” Tommy went on. “The Captain will tell you the same thing, sir, if you ask him—he must have noticed.”
“Sterilize it all, what was it doing?”
Tommy lowered his voice. “There was an ion trail shooting from it, sir. It was trying to get away!”
While the Mate was trying to absorb that, they reached the . bottom of the corridor and entered the vast globular space of Assembly Five, lined with crewmen waiting to witness the punishment of Tommy Loy.
This was not going to be any fun at all, thought Tommy, but at least he had paid back the Third Mate in full measure. The Mate, for the moment, at any rate, was not taking any joy in his promised extra rations.
When it was over, Tommy huddled in a comer of the crew compartment where they had tossed him, bruised and smarting in every nerve, shaken by the beating he had undergone. The pain was still rolling through him in faint, uncontrollable waves, and he winced at each one, in spite of himself, as though it were the original blow.
In the back of his mind, the puzzle of the metal ship was still calling, but the other experience was too fresh, the remembered images too vivid.
The Captain had begun, as always, by reciting the Creed.
In the beginning was the Spore, and the Spore was alone. (And the crew: Praised be the Spore!)
Next there was light, and the light was good. Yea, good for the Spore and the Spore’s First Children.
(Praised be they!)
&nbs
p; But the light grew evil in the days of the Spore’s Second Children.
(Woe unto them!)
And the light cast them out. Yea, exiled were they, into the darkness and the Great Deep.
(Pity for the outcasts in the Great Deep!)
Tommy had mumbled his responses with the rest of them, thinking rebellious thoughts. There was nothing evil about light; they lived by it still. What must have happened—the Captain himself admitted as much when he taught history and natural science classes—was that the earliest ancestors of the race, spawned in the flaming heart of the Galaxy, had grown too efficient for their own good.
They had specialized, more and more, in extracting energy from starlight and the random metal and other elements they encountered in space; and at last they absorbed, willy-nilly, more than they could use. So they had moved, gradually and naturally, over many generations, out from that intensely radiating region into the “Great Deep”—the universe of thinly scattered stars. And the process had continued, inevitably; as the level of available energy fell, their absorption of it grew more and more efficient.
Now, not only could they never return to their birthplace, but they could not even approach a single sun as closely as some planets did. Therefore the planets, and the stars themselves, were objects of fear. That was natural and sensible. But why did they have to continue this silly ritual, invented by some half-evolved, superstitious ancestor, of “outcasts” and “evil”?
The Captain finished:
Save us from the Death that lies in the Great Deep…
(The creeping Death that lies in the Great Deep!)
And keep our minds pure…
(As pure as the light in the days of the Spore, blessed be He!)
And our course straight…
(As straight as the light, brothers!)
That we may meet our lost brothers again in the Day of Reuniting.
(Speed that day!)
Then the pause, the silence that grew until it was like the silence of space. At last the Captain spoke again, pronouncing judgment against Tommy, ending, “Let him be whipped!”
Tommy tensed himself, thickening his skin, drawing his body into the smallest possible compass. Two husky Ordinaries seized him and tossed him at a third. As Tommy 208 floated across the room, the crewman pressed himself tigh tJy against the wall, drawing power from it until he could contain no more. And as Tommy neared him, he discharged it in a crackling arc that filled Tommy’s body with the pure essense of pain, and sent him hurtling across the chamber to the next shock, and the next, and the next.
Until the Captain had boomed, “Enough!” and they had carried him out and left him here alone.
He heard the voices of crewmen as they drew their rations. One of them was grumbling about the taste, and another, sounding happily bloated, was telling him to shut up and eat, that metal was metal.
That would be the new metal, however much of it had been absorbed by now, mingled with the old in the reservoir. Tommy wondered briefly how much of it there was, and whether the alien ship—if it was a ship—could repair even a little damage to itself. But that assumed life in the metal, and in spite of what he had seen, Tommy couldn’t believe in it. It seemed beyond question, though, that there were living things inside the metal; and when the metal was gone, how would they live?
Tommy imagined himself set adrift from the ship, alone in space, radiating more heat than his tiny volume could absorb. He shuddered.
He thought again of the problem that had obsessed him ever since he had seen the alien, five-pointed creatures in the metal ship. Intelligent life was supposed to be sacred. That was part of the Creed, and it was stated in a sloppy, poetic way like the rest of it, but it made a certain kind of sense. No crewman or captain had the right to destroy another for his benefit, because the same heredity was in them all. They were all potentially the same, none better than another.
And you ate metal, because metal was nonliving and certainly not intelligent. But if that stopped being true…
Tommy felt he was missing something. Then he had it: In the alien ship, trying to talk to the creatures that lived in metal, he had been scared almost scentless—but underneath the fright and the excitement, he had felt wonderful. It had been, he realized suddenly, like the mystic completion that was supposed to come when all the straight lines met, in the “Day of Reuniting”—when all the far-flung ships, parted for all the billions of years of their flight, came together at last. It was talking to someone different from yourself.
He wanted to talk again to the aliens, teach them to form their uncouth sounds into words, learn from them… Vague images swirled in his mind. They were products of an utterly different line of evolution. Who knew what they might be able to teach him?
And now the dilemma took shape. If his own ship absorbed the metal of theirs, they would die; therefore he would have to make the Captain let them go. But if he somehow managed to set them free, they would leave and he would never see them again.
A petty officer looked into the cubicle and said, “All right, Loy, out of it. You’re on garbage detail. You eat after you work, if there’s anything left. Lively, now!”
Tommy moved thoughtfully out into the corridor, his pain almost forgotten. The philosophical problems presented by the alien ship, too, having no apparent solution, were receding from his mind. A new thought was taking their place, one that made him glow inside with the pure rapture of the devoted practical jokester.
The whipping he was certainly going to get—and, so soon after the last offence, it would be a beauty—scarcely entered his mind.
IV
Roget climbed in, opening his helmet, and sat down warily in the acceleration couch. He didn’t look at the woman.
McMenamin said quietly, “Bad?”
“Not good. The outer skin’s gone all across that area, and it’s eating into the lead sheathing. The tubes are holding up pretty well, but they’ll be next.”
“We’ve done as much as we can, by rolling the ship around?”
“Just about. I’ll keep at it, but I don’t see how it can be more than a few hours before the tubes go. Then we’re cooked, whatever your fragrant little friend does.”
He stood up abruptly and climbed over the slanting wall which was now their floor, to peer out the direct view port. He swore, slowly and bitterly. “You try the radio again while I was out?” he asked.
“Yes.” She did not bother to add that there had been no response. Here, almost halfway between the orbits of earth and Mars, they were hopelessly out of touch. A ship as small as their couldn’t carry equipment enough to bridge the distance.
Roget turned around, said, “By God—” and then clenched his jaw and strode out of the room. McMenamin heard him walk through the bedroom and clatter around in the storage compartment behind.
In a few moments he was back with a welding torch in his hand. “Should have thought of this before,” he said. “I don’t know what’ll happen if I cut into that hull—damn thing may explode, for all I know—but it’s better than sitting doing nothing.” He put his helmet down with a bang and his voice came tinnily in her helmet receiver. “Be back in a minute.”
“Be careful,” McMenamin said again.
Roget closed the outer lock door behind him and looked at the ravished hull of the ship. The metal had been eaten away in a broad band all around the ship, just above the tail, as if a child had bitten around the small end of a pear. In places the clustered rocket tubes showed through. He felt a renewed surge of anger, with fear deep under it.
A hundred years ago, he reminded himself, the earliest space voyagers had encountered situations as bad as this one, maybe worse. But Roget was a city man, bred for city virtues. He didn’t, he decided, know quite how to feel or act. What were you supposed to do when you were about to die, fifteen million miles from home? Try to calm McMenamin _ who was dangerously calm already—or show your true nobility by making one of those deathbed speeches you read in the popular
histories? What about suggesting a little suicide pact? There was nothing in the ship that would give them a cleaner death than the one ahead of them. About all he could do would be to stab Frances, then himself, with a screwdriver.
Her voice said in the earphones, “You all right?”
He said, “Sure. Just going to try it.” He lowered himself to the green surface, careful not to let his knees touch the dark, corrosive area. The torch was a small, easily manageable tool. He pointed the snout at the dark area where it lapped up over the hull, turned the switch on and pressed the button. Flame leaped out, washing over the dark surface. Roget felt the heat through his suit. He turned off the torch to see what effect it had had.
There was a deep, charred pit in the dark stuff, and it seemed to him that It had pulled back a little from the area it was attacking. It was more than he had expected. Encouraged, he tried again.
There was a sudden tremor under him and he leaped nervously to his feet, just in time to avoid the corrosive wave as it rolled under him. For a moment he was only conscious of the thick metal of his boot soles and the thinness of the fabric that covered his knees; then, as he was about to step back out of the way, he realized that it was not only the dark ring that had expanded, that was still expanding.
He moved jerkily—too late—as the pale centre area swept toward and under him. Then he felt as if he had been struck by a mighty hammer.
His ears rang, and there was a mist in front of his eyes. He blinked, tried to raise an arm. It seemed to be stuck fast at the wrist and elbow. Panicked, he tried to push himself away and couldn’t. As his vision cleared, he saw that he was spread-eagled on the pale disk that had spread out under him. The metal collars of his wrist and elbow joints, all the metal parts of his suit, were held immovably. The torch lay a few inches away from his right hand.