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‘Why do you need to ask these questions?’
Scott caught him a ringing slap across the face and repeated in the same dead level tone, ‘Have you proof of all that?’
Crooner put his hand up to his cheek, and then suddenly pounced with arms extended. He was not quick enough. Master Scott chopped his arms expertly and ducked to one side; as he ducked, he produced a short rubber cosh, with which he smashed a blow behind Crooner’s knee. Crooner collapsed onto the floor.
‘Your reflexes are too slow,’ Scott said. ‘You should easily have been able to take me by surprise then.’
‘I was always called slow in Quarters.’
‘How long have you been with the Greene tribe?’ Scott demanded, standing over Crooner and waggling the cosh as if eager to use it again.
‘Oh – twice a hundred dozen sleep-wakes.’
‘We do not use your primitive method of calculating time here. We call four sleep-wakes one day. That would make your stay in Quarters six hundred days. A long time in a man’s life.’
Crooner made no reply to this. At that juncture an excited man burst into the room and grabbed Scott by the arm.
‘You’re needed at once at the barricades!’ he exclaimed. ‘An attack is developing. Everyone is needed.’
‘Right, I’m coming,’ Scott said. Without another glance at Crooner, they hurried from the room, leaving him sprawled on the floor.
In some alarm, Brandyholm looked up from the spyhole through which he had been observing this interview.
‘So the business about the attack at the barricades is just bluff to get Master Scott out of the room?’ he asked Viann.
She nodded. ‘There are no barricades.’
‘Why?’
She closed her spy-hole before answering. When she did reply, her voice was slow and held none of the confidence her appearance suggested. ‘For the final part of this rough test we have devised for you, of course. Now that you have passed this test, I can explain.’
‘It was not – not a bravery test, was it?’
‘If it was you would hardly have passed it, would you?’ Viann was inspecting him closely, and he found himself looking reluctantly into her eyes. They were very clear and held an alertness which sent nervous excitement through him. Finally she said, ‘Listen, Tom Brandyholm, this ship has been travelling a long time – too long, far too long. It is slowly becoming a ghost ship. Two chief problems confront us; one you can guess: how to control the ship, and make it stop somewhere. If it does not stop, only death can await us.’ She stopped there, her eyes brooding, and finally said, ‘That problem seems insuperable … But the other problem is one we can deal with. There is a strange race on this ship – a new race that was not here before.’
‘You mean – a new tribe, like the Greene tribe?’ he asked, looking anxiously at her strained beauty (so much more desirable than Gwenny had ever been).
‘No, nothing like that!’ she said impatiently. ‘A super-natural race, masquerading as men! You know the ponic tangles, don’t you?’
Brandyholm nodded dumbly, recalling the thickets they had ploughed through before being captured.
‘In those tangles,’ Viann continued, ‘a new race has generated itself, or so I believe. Half the ship is filled with that silent, impenetrable ponic growth, and somewhere, somewhere this race has been born. They come in from their secret centre to spy upon us and learn our ways. But although they try to, they do not and cannot behave like us in all respects. All strangers who are found near Forwards are now subjected to tests, devised to weed out these aliens. You have just undergone your test. Crooner has now almost finished his.’
How do you tell these – aliens?’ Brandyholm asked.
‘For one thing, they seem to be longer lived than we; consequently, their actions are slower. They seem calmer in manner, more phlegmatic.’
She would have said more, but Master Scott entered the room. Triumph lent his face an unaccustomed liveliness. He looked searchingly at Brandyholm, and then said, ‘Your friend Bob Crooner is proved to be an alien. It is definite.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Brandyholm.
‘I suspected as much,’ Viann said. ‘We watched his interview from the spyholes here.’
‘How did you prove it?’ Brandyholm asked.
‘We’ve just had the final proof. When I left him alone, he made out by the other door, just as you did. He saw Carappa, but hardly paused. Instead, he hurried on and escaped into the ponic tangle.’
‘How does that prove anything?’
‘You, when you were escaping, still had to stop and perform the fear ceremony over the dead. Why? Because from birth all of us on the ship are taught that ceremony as routine. Not so Crooner! He scarcely broke his stride. You see, his upbringing has been – different. He is of the alien company.’
‘He was always different,’ Brandyholm muttered reflectively. ‘Cheerful … slow … saying little.’ Then he bowed his head, shaken to think he had lived with the man and cautiously liked him.
‘Crooner is now being followed by our men,’ Scott continued. ‘He will lead them to the secret haunts of the aliens. And then – we will hunt them out and slay them all. My mouth waters at the thought of that killing. You will help us, Brandyholm?’
Silence. Viann’s eyes upon him.
‘No,’ Brandyholm said. ‘You killed my priest, who was no alien. To the devil with you all.’
He did not look up, hunched tensely, waiting to be struck. The blow never came. Instead, footsteps came over to him, and a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.
‘Mourning for me is not only forbidden but premature, Tom,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get up, you worm, and spit the world in the face.’
He looked up, and it was Carappa. He exclaimed the priest’s name, clutching his arm in his incredulity.
‘Yes, I, Tom, and confoundedly cold. This witch doctor, Scott here, painted me with rat’s blood and laid me out with some beastly drug to stage a death bed scene for you and – the other.’
‘A slight overdose of chloral hydrate,’ said Scott.
‘How are you feeling, priest?’ Viann inquired, with scientific curiosity rather than womanly sympathy in her voice.
‘Desolate, madam. And what would that beastly antidote be that your men shot into me?’
‘Strychnine, I believe it’s called.’
‘Very unpleasant. They also condescended to give me a hot coffee; I never tasted anything so good in Quarters.’ He caught Brandyholm’s eye still upon him and said, ‘I’m no ghost, you see Tom. Ghosts don’t drink coffee.’
‘I still can’t believe you’re alive!’ Brandyholm gasped.
‘Then you are persisting in a particularly irritating brand of foolishness,’ Viann said, moving towards the door. ‘Try to realise that you are no longer a yokel in a jungle outpost; pull yourself together if you wish to live in Forwards. We need wits here. Come on below, everyone. We will eat, and then await a report from Crooner’s trackers. After that, we shall be busy.’
V
The meal was excellent, not only in the standard of the food, but in the blessed absence of the swarms of flies which attended every mouthful back in Quarters. It was slightly marred for Brandyholm and Carappa by the presence of the Council of Five, the rulers of Forwards, who came to hear what Master Scott and Viann had discovered. These five worthies paid no attention whatsoever to the two strangers.
‘It is just a custom,’ Scott explained airily to Carappa, when the priest commented on this insult after the Five had again withdrawn.
‘They should have acknowledged me at least,’ snorted Carappa. ‘Look here, Master Scott, my interest in this whole business is purely theological, but what I want to know is – what do I get out of it?’
Viann answered the question, smiling sourly.
‘So far, you have retained your life, priest: a doubtful benefit, possibly. What other advantages you – and we – everyone – will extract from the situation remains to be seen. But it seems that the electric wiring manual you tried to hide from us – it has been recovered from your erstwhile cell – will be useful. We have what we lacked before: a plan of the ship.’
‘You are a man of vigour and brain, priest,’ Scott added. ‘To keep those virtues at our service it is necessary to retain your tongue in your head; please try and keep it to the immediate problem as much as possible.’
Brandyholm, tired of sitting quietly, said, ‘Why are there no plans of the ship, no controls? How did the ship leave without them?’
He received a withering glare from the priest. ‘An accident happened,’ the latter said tersely.
‘It seems likely the ship left Procyon without the present ponic tangle,’ said Viann. ‘We believe all parts of the ship were clear and could communicate with each other.’
Carappa struck his fist on the table, rattling the empty dishes. ‘Some terrible wrong of our forefathers!’ he exclaimed.
There was a brief knock at the door and a messenger entered, giving the customary greeting, which Master Scott returned. He said he was a runner who had gone with the warriors deputed to follow Bob Crooner. Crooner had dived into the ponic tangle but had gone only a few yards before stopping in a side corridor. There he had pulled the ponic stalks aside with his bare hands, torn out their roots and scooped away the nine inches or so of decayed vegetable matter which covered the floor. After a little searching, he located what he was looking for, and opened up a circular hatch. He rapidly climbed down into this and disappeared, closing the hatch after him.
‘Well?’ Scott demanded of the runner. ‘And then?’
‘I was then despatched with this report, sir,’ said the runner. ‘The warriors stayed guard over the place. In a day, it would be covered by new ponic sprouts.’
‘The aliens cannot live under the floor between levels,’ Scott said, frowning. ‘We had better go there straightaway and investigate. What say you, Viann?’
‘Ready,’ she said, throwing her head up as if scenting battle, and patting her dazer. ‘You two had better come with us,’ she added to the priest and Brandyholm. The latter looked dubiously at Carappa, who nodded eagerly.
‘Take your report to the Council of Five, tell them we have gone ahead and ask them to hold men in readiness,’ Scott snapped to the messenger.
He left the room at the double, the others following. They ran along a short passage, clattered down a companionway and branched thence into the corridor along which Crooner had escaped. The trail of broken ponics was easy to follow, and in five minutes they stood beside three armed men, gazing down at the round bolt hole.
‘Whoever enters there first risks getting shot,’ Viann remarked speculatively.
‘Alas that the hole is too small for me to enter at all,’ Carappa said hastily.
‘Open it up, you, and go and see what’s down there,’ Master Scott motioned to one of the men.
‘Er – yes, sir. Can’t we put the lights out along here?’ the man said, rubbing his hands nervously together.
‘We shall see if that will be necessary. Hurry!’
Reluctantly, the man dropped onto hands and knees, pulled up the hatch, and instantly fell onto his face. Nothing happened. He picked himself up sheepishly and dangled one leg into the aperture. It remained attached to his body, and encouraged by an expletive from Scott he lowered himself down. From above, his unkempt head could be seen to bob down and disappear. Then it reappeared, he tilted his face up and called, ‘He’s not here. This is a sort of corridor, about two feet high. Now can I come up?’
At Scott’s signal, the fellow’s companions hauled him roughly out. Unhooking a flat torch from his belt, Scott looked briefly at his companions.
‘Coming?’ he asked, with a crooked smile, and climbed down into the bolt-hole.
This spot was actually a kind of crossroads for two of the inspection walks which were concealed beneath every floor of the ship. Sandwiched here, between deck and deck, were the vessel’s vital parts, the countless miles of wire and cable and pipe and air channel which made life possible. Sealed away, these shallow, essential areas had escaped the spreading menace of the ponics; and so a sort of survival had been possible.
Scrutinising the four low walks stretching away from him, Scott instantly determined the way Crooner had taken: only one walk had its thin layer of dust disturbed by a pattern of hands, knees and feet created by a hurrying man. Dim lights lit each walk. Scott sheathed his torch and started off on all fours, without bothering to wait for the others. Viann followed him, then Brandyholm, then Carappa, who slipped in nimbly enough when he looked like being left behind.
Progress, being on hands and knees, was not rapid; but Scott forged grimly ahead, ignoring the colour codes painted on the various bulky casing which hemmed their route. The scuffled pattern in the dust stretched encouragingly before him. Once, following this trail, they turned through ninety degrees and still proceeded.
‘I never realised before how confoundedly big this ship was,’ grumbled Carappa.
The trail ended at last, in a dead end – at the outer skin of the ship, although they could not realise that. Feeling above his head, Scott located another trap door. This was a more complicated affair than the one by which they had entered the system of subterranean walks, possessing a double, self-closing hatch.
‘Well?’ Scott asked Viann, sliding round to face her. ‘Do we go up?’
‘Wait!’ she gasped. ‘I’m exhausted. No stomach or breath to fight!’
‘You do well for a woman,’ he said harshly, and kissed her shining face in a gesture which held more encouragement than tenderness.
It felt to Brandyholm as if a knife had been twisted in his heart. He was suddenly swamped with jealousy and hatred of this man Scott.
‘Let’s get on with the work!’ he said thickly.
‘Hark, the yokel!’ Viann said amusedly, but slid to one side as Brandyholm wriggled past her. He pushed past Scott and, reaching up his arms, flung back first the lower then the upper hatch. Then he thrust his head up.
They heard him give an inarticulate cry, and then he slithered back among them, gasping. Viann caught his shoulders and held his head in the crook of her arm.
‘Dazers!’ snapped Scott. ‘Come on, or they’ll murder us down here!’
With a bound, he was out of the walk, his weapon thrust before him. He too gave a strangled cry. As they scrambled out to him, they heard his dazer drop from a suddenly limp hand and clang on the metal floor. Then they too saw what he saw, and knew.
The ship’s starboard emergency escape lock was empty but for the four of them. Large enough to house a half-dozen lorries, it was furnished only with escape equipment stored along one wall. Dominating everything, compelling their owed gaze, was the window by the outer door: beyond it, plumbless, eternal, stars tossed into it like pebbles into an immeasurable sack, was space.
They were the first inhabitants of the ship for many generations to look into that mighty void. Together, they sank to their knees and stared. Everything was forgotten but that spectacle.
To one side of the window from where they were, riding majestically in space, was a bright crescent. Upon its surface, although sheathed under a veil of silver, continents and sea were visible. To their unaccustomed eyes, it was a thing of magnificent terror – yet in the terror was a wild gong beat of hope.
For a lifetime of seconds, the four absorbed that panorama together. Viann was the first to recover. She walked slowly over to the window and said, ‘So we have, after all, arrived somewhere!’
Looking at her proud head outlined against the brilliant sweep of that crescent, Brandyholm thought feverishly to himself that both contained a magic he desired: woman and world, for a moment both were the same thing, a joy unattainable, a hope out of reach, symbols merely of all opportunities denied.
‘Our man went out there somewhere,’ the practical Scott said, pointing to the line of Crooner’s footprints which went right up to the outer door. ‘If we want to follow him, we have to go out there too. What say you, Viann?’
‘Why did they not construct more ports in this ship? This is the first to be found, except for the shuttered ports in the control room.’
‘Let’s cope with one problem at a time,’ Scott said testily. ‘Do we or do we not go out after Crooner?’
‘Of course we go out, Master Scott,’ she answered. ‘Who could think of staying with that to lure them?’
Carappa was rummaging in the escape equipment. This emergency lock had been designed to cope with people much like themselves: veritable novices who had never seen a space suit before. Consequently full instructions were given for the precautions to be taken before the outer door was opened. Carappa read everything carefully out.
‘Let me put on a suit and go out first,’ he said shakily. ‘If it’s alright, you can follow. This is the moment foretold in the Teaching: “That this unnatural life may be delivered down to journey’s end. And sanity propagated. And the ship brought home.” It is fitting a priest should go first.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Brandyholm said suddenly. ‘I’ll be by your side, priest. Nobody shall stop me!’
‘Nobody intends to,’ Scott said coolly. ‘I was about to suggest myself that our two most expendable members should lead the way.’
‘May your ego die on you,’ offered Carappa insultingly. ‘Here Tom, help me into this suit. It is heavy for a poor old man.’
