скачать книгу бесплатно
Getting the suits properly adjusted was a slow and irritating business. Long before it was over, Brandyholm cursed the false bravado which had made him thrust himself forward. At last, however, they were ready. With a final repetition of his instructions to reconnoitre and then hurry back, Master Scott ushered Viann through the manhole in the deck, retreating after her. The self-sealing double lid closed down over his head. Carappa instantly stomped over to the air valve and activated it according to instructions.
Then he clapped Brandyholm on the back, and his voice over the suit-to-suit R/T crackled with triumph. ‘Well, Tom, boy, we’ve won through. This fellow Scott is a fool! – He’s played right into my hands. Once this outer lock door is open, none of them can reach us – they’ll be killed. Space is lethal! The non-stop voyage is over for us at least.’
‘What about the aliens?’ Brandyholm asked.
‘Faint heart hath never won foul fiend,’ the priest quoted. He waved a dazer before Brandyholm’s eyes. ‘I took the opportunity of removing this from our lady friend’s holster. I can deal with Crooner well enough. Trust me, boy!’
An amber light winked over the outer door; the air was exhausted. Without another word, Carappa depressed the exit switch. A red light flicked on and burnt steadily, and all space lay open before them. With a mounting sense of awe, they moved to the brink of the aperture. They looked out.
The great cylinder of the ship stretched to either side of them, lustreless and solid. Before them, the planet rode mysteriously, its dark side cutting a black semi-circle from the brocade of stars.
From where they stood, the sun was hidden by the flanks of the ship.
Stretching out a gloved hand, Carappa pointed. To their left, the smooth expanse of metal was broken by an ungainly accretion; even to their inexperienced eyes, it was obviously no integral part of the ship. Square and cumbrous, it was attached by metal braces and bore an air of improvisation. A circular port set in its near side emitted light.
‘The aliens must be there,’ Carappa said. A hawser stretching from the lock towards this strange construction reinforced his opinion.
Grasping the hawser, Carappa pulled himself out over the edge of the lock and climbed onto the outside of the ship. He waited patiently until Brandyholm had hauled himself up too. For a moment they stood silent, side by side. The lock door slid to behind them. Then, holding tightly to the hawser, they moved along towards the square outbuilding.
‘Stop!’ Brandyholm gasped. He stood, slumped in his suit, while the universe wheeled about him. He wondered crazily what it would sound like to Carappa if he were sick in his suit. Then the moment of dizziness passed, and they moved on again.
They stood at last among the stanchions of the outbuilding, which towered some fourteen feet over their heads. The simplicity of the structure was now apparent: it consisted simply of a room from which an air lock protruded like a porch. Peering cautiously through the small window, Brandyholm saw that the room was mainly occupied with a variety of equipment, although it obviously served too as an at least temporary living quarter, for in a hammock stretched across one corner lay Crooner. He was alone.
Obeying Brandyholm’s gesture, Carappa also looked in.
‘How do we get in without disturbing him? It’s hopeless,’ Brandyholm said.
‘The human predicament apart,’ said the priest decisively, ‘Nothing is hopeless. Obviously, we must use guile. It is against my principles, but we must use guile. We must get in under pretence of friendship; once we’re in, he’s ours. Leave it to me.’
With that, he hammered on the thick glass before him. Crooner looked up, and climbed slowly out of his hammock; he still wore his heavy space suit, although he had removed his helmet. Carappa made frantic and unmistakeable signs towards the airlock. Crooner nodded.
‘Gullible fool!’ the priest exclaimed with relish.
VI
They were in the air lock when Crooner’s voice, from a speaker overhead, said, ‘What on earth are you two doing outside the ship?’
‘We managed to escape just after you did.’
‘How did you find your way here?’
‘We’ll give you the details when we get inside,’ Carappa retorted, holding the stolen dazer ready and winking at Brandyholm.
Air sighed in about them, double doors began slowly to open, Carappa moved forward, and a steel bar descended sharply onto the barrel of the dazer, sending it flying from Carappa’s grasp. Then Crooner appeared from behind the lock doors, the bar in one hand, and in the other a sharp and dangerous looking weapon they did not recognise; it pointed without waver at the priest’s heart.
‘Come out,’ Crooner said grimly, his face as lined and motionless as a tree trunk. ‘There’s no room for a scuffle in here. If I so much as suspect you of being about to rush me, I shall shoot you dead with this revolver.’
‘Bob, Bob,’ Carappa said, trying to force a note of reproach into his voice, ‘Why turn on your old friends like this? We mean you no harm. As a priest I’m bound to say – ’
‘Say nothing, Carappa. From your point of view it is unfortunate that these ship’s suit radios were so devised that unwary novices could not shut themselves off from contact with each other – they’re always at Transmit. In other words, I’ve heard every word you both said since you put the suits on. You always talked too much, Carappa, it’s a sort of poetic justice.’
‘Justice!’ Carappa growled, ‘I loathe its very name. Shoot me if you must, but don’t babble of justice!’
These words came indistinctly to Brandyholm. Uncertainty, danger and fear were having a cumulative effect on him. A kind of palsy took him, and without warning he collapsed. Crooner let him fall.
When Brandyholm’s brain cleared and he opened his eyes again, he was lying prone on the floor. Crooner stood over him. He could see enough of Carappa to observe that the big priest now had his hands lashed firmly behind his back. The two were talking, and did not notice Brandyholm’s recovery.
‘I don’t understand,’ the priest was saying – words rarely heard on his lips – ‘You are not an alien or you are? Which?’
‘The term “alien” is subjective,’ Crooner said patiently. ‘As I say, I am from Earth, just as your ancestors were, generations ago. Earth is only a couple of thousand miles away – you saw it outside, a gleaming crescent.’
‘Then the ship got back after all?’
‘The ship got back after all. Yes. It was watched for and sighted long before it reached the skirts of the solar system. When it radiated answers to Earth’s signals, a fast pilot was sent out with a boarding party. The party found the ship’s controls partially ruined, but managed to pull it into an orbit round Earth. That was three of your generations ago. They then completely destroyed the controls – you say you saw their wreckage – and left the ship.’
‘But why, why – ’ Carappa sounded as if he were choking, ‘ – what form of warped cruelty made you leave us there? You could see how things were – all out of hand, death stalking us, the ponic tangle threatening to overwhelm us …’
His voice died. He saw too vividly the heroism of that terrible flight across the light years and back. The survivors, if only for the sake of the generations who had died, should have been saved and honoured.
‘Why were we left?’ Carappa asked brokenly.
‘There was a reason,’ Crooner said. His voice, suddenly full of compassion, became lost on Brandyholm for a moment. Brandyholm’s eye, when he turned his head only slightly on the hard floor, rested on an object he could not at first identify. With a shock, he realised it was the priest’s dazer, about a foot from his face. When Crooner knocked it flying, it had wedged between two cased pieces of equipment and he had not bothered to retrieve it. Brandyholm had only to lift his hand to grasp it.
‘… Procyon V was the only possible planet,’ Crooner was saying. ‘And surface gravity there was one and a half Gs. So there was not as much trouble as had been feared to get volunteers to start the home run. As I’ve said, the outer journey nearly ended in famine and asphyxiation. But they took off again with a stock of new carbohydrates and amino acids. That was where the trouble began. And it began almost at once, as far as we can tell.
‘Giantism began in the hydroponic tanks. It spread rapidly. A virus-borne infection swept through the crew like wild fire. Few died, but almost all were prostrated for weeks. When they recovered strength, the ship was rapidly becoming as you know it – bulging from stem to stern with the giant hydroponics, ponics as you call them.
‘You might almost suspect them of possessing intelligence, so rapidly did they adapt. Low gravity had suddenly given them a tremendous fillip. They destroyed everything, they created their own humus, partly by a rapid fruition cycle, partly by an almost symbiotic use of tiny insects, whose bodies paved the way for further growth.
‘The people of the ship lived in isolated groups among this entanglement. And they too changed. Some of the domestic animals – the ship’s piggery for instance – escaped the tangle and became wild. Others died. Soon almost the only source of food was the ponics themselves. And then men, too, began to speed up. Their life expectation eventually became not eighty years, but twenty.’
‘You mean – you live four times as long as we in the ship?’ said Carappa.
‘It is so. Which is why I always appeared slow to you. Which is why, too, one sleep-wake in four was dim. You see – ’
‘Yes, I see,’ Carappa said. ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of lighting,’ he quoted. ‘Six hours has become a whole day to us! We thought we were human beings, and we’re not. We’re – monsters, pigmies, things out of order, mechanical toys which flail their arms and legs too fast …’
He broke off, subsiding into mountainous sobs which were more impressive than his spoken outburst. Unable to raise his hands to his face, he sat shaking with internal strife while the tears burst down his crumpled countenance.
The sight roused Brandyholm to action. With one continuous, flowing movement, he seized the dazer and was on his feet. Fast as he was, Crooner could have shot him before he was on his knees: but a fatal hesitancy delayed the Earthman, a sense of compunction the others would neither have understood nor appreciated, and next moment he dropped the gun and nursed his paralysed arm to his side.
Brandyholm blew on his warm dazer triumphantly; he felt better again, more a man. The effect of the action on Carappa, too, was swift. His tears dried and he was again in command.
‘Expansion to your ego, Tom,’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t guess you had it in you! Come and undo me quickly, and we’ll settle for this fellow.’
When he was free, he grunted in satisfaction and lumbered over to Crooner, who leant, deathly white, against a radio panel.
Seizing him by the armpits, and propping him roughly up until his head rattled against the metal, Carappa said, ‘Now, Crooner, we want some information from you before Tom and I leave for Earth. You must instruct us how to get there. But first I want to know what you were doing on the ship at all.’
‘You can’t get back to Earth, Carappa,’ Crooner said. Then, as the priest’s grip tightened, he said hurriedly, ‘I’m an anthropologist. Although you are human, you people have become – owing to your environment – a completely separate race. It is doubtful if you could even inter-marry with Earthmen. When the ship first returned, it was decided you were all unfit to leave your environment: you would have died. You had already adapted to the ship’s nightmare conditions. It was decided we should not interfere with you, that your journey should continue non-stop until further speeding up and degeneration in the metabolism of your descendants brought the inevitable end.’
‘And you?’ growled Carappa.
‘I was sent as an anthropologist, to live among and observe what is, to us, a strange race. It’s a three year stretch – tough, but engrossing and – well paid. I am not the first, nor the only anthropologist. We have to undergo long training; then we are slipped in the emergency hatch, and find our way through the ponics either to Quarters or Forwards, or one of the other tribes. But they have some good brains in Forwards. The Council of Five caught one or two of my earlier colleagues, and although they gave as little as possible away, suspicions are aroused, as you know. I was lucky to get away as I have.’
‘That luck may not last,’ Carappa said threateningly. ‘You have to get Tom and me safely to Earth before you can be sure you have survived.’
Still gripping his right elbow, Crooner straightened himself.
‘That’s not in my hands,’ he said. ‘Directly I got here, I radioed to Satellite One, told them of my plight and asked them to pick me up. A rocket’s on its way over now, to take me down Earthside. My spell of field work was nearly over anyway – by Jove, won’t civilisation be good, to say nothing of a decent drink! But whether or not you come down with me is not for me to say; the boys on the rocket’ll decide that.’
‘I can shoot ’em all!’ Brandyholm snapped suddenly. He waved the gun demonstratively.
Crooner just laughed. ‘I suppose you might be able to, little man. And what good would that do you?’
There was silence, accompanied by some lip chewing from the priest.
‘The rocket’ll be here in about twenty minutes,’ Crooner announced casually. He looked more confident now.
‘It does seem rather a deadlock, Carappa,’ Brandyholm said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we went back into the ship?’
Carappa ignored the suggestion, and said smoothly to Crooner, ‘It seems, Bob, as if we shall need your help after all. As you realise, we intend you no harm, otherwise we should have shot you like a pig long before this. And don’t forget how Tom here saved your life when Wantage went beserk in the tangle.’
‘It’s useless whining at me,’ Crooner said. ‘I’m not your judge. I told you, it’s all up to the boys on the rocket.’
‘Now don’t get me wrong, Bob. Why are we not free – why is not everyone on shipboard free – to return to Earth?’
Crooner paused. ‘Do you really want an answer?’ he asked.
‘What is the answer?’
‘It’s the answer to everything, as far as you are concerned,’ Crooner said sadly. ‘You are valuable to Earth for only one reason: you are an insane society. For that we study you, and by that study learn to control ourselves. Fortunately, you are too isolated up here to be a menace; but if you were an Earthbound tribe, you would have to be exterminated to the last babe among you. You are all dangerously mad.’
He let the words sink in, and then said, ‘When the ponics overwhelmed the ship, a few men saw the terrible dangers of a return to primitivism. Madness, fighting, even cannibalism were rampant; the controls were wrecked. That’s when the Teaching was formulated. Unfortunately it was based, not on any long-tried religious creed, but on some half-truth of a psychological theory which happened to be current at that time. It became diverted and perverted in the hands of so-called priests like yourself, until the ship was full of maniacs whose avowed object in life was to humiliate their associates. You’re death-obsessed. That’s why you aren’t fit to walk on Earth! You’re tainted, mephitic, contagious! Earth’s too lovely for you! You’re only fit to live in a coffin like this ship! Nothing’s too foul – Ahhh!’
Reeling away from Carappa’s blow, he brought his good hand up to his mouth, covering it as if to hide the pain. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes, groaning.
‘Quickly, Tom,’ Carappa said. ‘There’s no time to lose. If that’s how things stand, we’ve no hope but to warn the others in the ship – Master Scott and the Council of Five. This fellow comes back with us.’
‘No!’ Crooner cried. ‘Shoot me, do anything, but don’t take me back in there!’
Carappa paused, his eyes widening. Slowly over his face a crafty smile dawned. He had struck accidentally on Crooner’s weak spot.
‘A bargain then, Crooner,’ he said gently. ‘You come back to face the Council of Five with us now – or else you guarantee to get us two to earth, as patients, or subjects for further study, or whatever excuse you wish. Well? Choose quickly.’
‘Let’s get him back to the ship,’ Brandyholm urged.
Crooner looked from one to another of them like a man peering at wild animals. The blood from his mouth had been brushed over his jaw, giving him a dirty, beaten look. He licked his lips with a dry tongue.
‘I daresay I could get you down,’ he said.
‘That’s more like it!’ Carappa said. ‘Now we’ll forget all differences between us, Crooner – but remember I shall have this gun trained on you.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ Brandyholm said, ‘I’d rather return to the ship, Carappa. I think Earth’s going to be too big for me.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Carappa said. ‘We’ve been together in this all along, Tom; I won’t let you desert me now. You’re coming too.’
‘I couldn’t face it,’ Brandyholm pleaded. ‘Please let me go. I’m a different kind from you – I belong to the ship.’
As he watched, Carappa’s face hardened dangerously. The priest’s fist doubled and came slowly up. His lips gradually thrust out, as if in relish at the weakness in Brandyholm’s features. Then he shrugged, and said in a flat voice, ‘Get out, then.’ He turned his broad back in contempt.
That there should be no trust between men was an integral part of the Teaching. It seemed a miracle to Brandyholm to be standing again in the peppered night of space: he had momentarily expected a bullet in the back from the priest’s gun.
He squared his shoulders inside the space suit and began to walk slowly back to the escape lock in the giant hull. His feeble bluff had succeeded; liars like Carappa can easily be taken in by lies. Without a doubt Crooner would trick the priest sooner or later, whereas he, Tom Brandyholm, had escaped by returning; he had the power that lay in knowledge. His was the victory.
He came to the lock. Remembering Carappa could hear over the suit-to-suit, he said, ‘Good-bye, priest. I’m just going back into the rat run. Only it’s going to be a different rat run from now on. The Council of Five is going to be a Council of Six. Or if I don’t like their manners, it may just be a Council of One. You thought I was weak, but I’m not. I’m going to show ’em all.’
He clung to a hand-grip to steady himself. Ambition seemed suddenly to consume his very bones.
‘And remember Master Scott, Carappa?’ he continued. ‘He’ll be the first to go to the wall. And that girl Viann – ’ as he spoke her name, she seemed at that instant to be the reason for his return ‘– Viann might well be all that Gwenny never could be.’
The priest flung back an obscene answer which Brandyholm scarcely heeded. He activated the lock. Slowly the panel slid back. The ship! It always had been his world and always would: its confinement, its jungles, its foetid corridors, its taboos and terrors; but now he would be more than a mere hunter – he would be a ruler. Eagerly, he stepped inside.
A dozen figures awaited him. He drew up in amazement. Although they all wore suits and helmets, he recognised Viann at once. And another face that he knew was Master Scott’s. Master Scott, as did many of the others, held a weapon levelled at Brandyholm’s heart.
‘Yes, we’ve been listening carefully over the suit radios,’ Master Scott said. ‘You came back inopportunely, didn’t you?’
‘Uh – uh,’ Brandyholm began, but no words came. His last bolt had been shot. Now the journey was over. The pressures in his brain burst out against their artificial dam, flooding and breaking their neural paths. He tried to summon rage to his aid, to help and strengthen him, but it would not come. He reeled blindly in the semi-dark.
‘We were waiting quietly here to rush the relief rocket when it arrives,’ Scott said levelly. ‘And then in you come, with your big ideas. Well, I think there’s still time to finish you.’
He turned to look at Viann, who had rested a hand on his suit. She shook her head.
‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘He’s harmless now.’
Indeed, Brandyholm had slumped to his knees, almost in an attitude of prayer. The great stars beyond him were suddenly blotted out by the dark, arriving shape of the relief rocket.
Psyclops (#ulink_3f9820a9-8b10-548e-8885-45c2b27f9794)
Mmm I.
First statement: I am I. I am everything. Everything, everywhere.
The universe is constructed of me, I am the whole of it. Am I? What is that throbbing that is not of me? That must be me too; after a while I shall understand it. All now is dim. Dim mmmm.
Even I am dim. In all this great strangeness and darkness of me, in all this universe of me, I am shadow. A memory of me. Could I be a memory of … not – me? Paradox: if I am everything, could there be a not-me?
Why am I having thoughts? Why am I not, as I was before, just mmmm?
