Non-Stop

by Brian W Aldiss

  The old man was suddenly weeping, the long salt tears raining down his cheeks. He hardly tried to check them.

  ‘You ought to be told,’ he said. ‘You’ve all suffered so much… too much. That’s Earth out there — but you can’t go to it. The Long Journey… the Long Journey has got to go on forever. It’s just one of those cruel things.’

  Complain grabbed him by his scrawny throat.

  ‘Listen to me, Deight,’ he snarled. ‘If that’s Earth, why aren’t we down there, and who are you — and the Outsiders — and the Giants? Who are you all, eh? Who are you?’

  ‘We’re — we’re from Earth,’ Zac Deight husked. He waved his hands fruitlessly before Complain’s contorted face; he was being shaken like an uprooted ponic stalk. Marapper was shouting in Complain’s ear and wrenching at his shoulder. They were all shouting together, Deight’s face growing crimson under Complain’s tightening grasp. They barged into the space suits and sent two crashing to the floor, sprawling on top of them. Then finally the priest managed to pry Complain’s fingers away from the councillor’s throat.

  ‘You’re crazy, Roy!’ he gasped. ‘You’ve gone crazy! You were throttling him to death.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what he said?’ Complain shouted. ‘We’re victims of some dreadful conspiracy –’

  ‘Make him speak to Little Dog first — make him speak first — he’s the only one who can work this radio thing! Make him speak, Roy. You can kill him and ask questions after.’

  Gradually the words filtered into Complain’s comprehension. The blinding anger and frustration ebbed like a crimson tide from his mind. Marapper, as always canny where his own safety was concerned, had spoken wisely. With an effort, Complain gained control of himself again. He stood up and dragged Deight roughly to his feet.

  ‘What is Little Dog?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s… it’s the code name for an institute on the planet, set up to study the inmates of this ship,’ Zac Deight said, rubbing his throat.

  ‘To study!… Well, get on to them right quick and say — say some of your men are ill and they’ve got to send a ship straight away to fetch them down to Earth. And don’t say anything else or we’ll tear you apart and feed you to the rats. Go on!’

  ‘Ah!’ Marapper rubbed his hands in appreciation and gave his cloak a tug down at the back. ‘That’s spoken like a true believer, Roy. You’re my favourite sinner. And when the ship gets here, we overpower the crew and go back to Earth in it. Everyone goes! Everyone! Every man, woman and mutant from here to Sternstairs!’

  Zac Deight cradled the set in his arm, switching on power. Then, braving their anger, he mustered his courage and turned to face them.

  ‘Let me just say this to you both,’ he said, with dignity. ‘Whatever happens — and I greatly fear the outcome of all this terrible affair — I’d like you to remember what I am telling you. You feel cheated, rightly. Your lives are enclosed in suffering by the narrow walls of this ship. But wherever you lived, in whatsoever place or time, your lives would not be free of pain. For everyone in the universe, life is a long, hard journey. If you –’

  ‘That’ll do, Deight,’ Complain said. ‘We’re not asking for paradise: we’re demanding to choose where we suffer. Start talking to Little Dog.’

  Resignedly, his face pale, Zac Deight started to call, all too aware of the dazer a yard from his face. In a moment, a clear voice from the plastic box said: ‘Hullo, Big Dog. Little Dog here, receiving you loud and clear. Back.’

  ‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ Zac Deight said, then stopped. He painfully cleared his throat. The sweat coursed down his forehead. As he paused, Complain’s weapon jerked under his nose, and he began again, staring momentarily out at the sun in anguish. ‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ he said. ‘Will you please send up a ship to us at once — the dizzies are loose! Help! Help! The dizzies are loose! Come armed! The dizzies — aaargh!…’

  He took Complain’s blast in the teeth, Marapper’s in the small of his back. He crumpled over, the radio chattering as it fell with him. He did not even twitch. He was dead before he hit the deck. Marapper seized the instrument up from the floor.

  ‘All right!’ he bawled into it. ‘Come and get us, you stinking scab-devourers! Come and get us!’

  With a heave of his arm, the priest sent the set shattering against the bulkhead. Then, with characteristic change of mood, he fell on his knees before Zac Deight’s body, in the first gesture of prostration, and began the last obsequies over it.

  Fists clenched, Complain stared numbly out at the planet. He could not join the priest. The compulsion to perform ritual gestures over the dead had left him; he seemed to have grown beyond superstition. But what transfixed him was a realization which evidently had not occurred to Marapper, a realization which cancelled all their hopes.

  After a thousand delays, they had found Earth was near. Earth was their true home. And Earth, on Zac Deight’s admission, had been taken over by Giants and Outsiders. It was against that revelation Complain had burnt his anger in vain.

  V

  Laur Vyann stood silent and helpless, watching the furious activity on Deck 20. She managed to stand by wedging herself in a broken doorway: the gravity lines on this deck had been severed in the assaults of Master Scoyt’s stormtroopers. Now directions in the three concentric levels had gone crazy; ups and downs existed that had never existed before, and for the first time Vyann realized just how ingeniously the engineers who designed the ship had worked. Half the deck, under these conditions, would be impossible to live in: the compartments were built on the ceilings.

  Near Vyann, equally silent, were a cluster of Forwards women, some of them clutching children. They watched, many of them, the destruction of their homes.

  Scoyt, clad only in a pair of shorts, black as a pot, had fully recovered from his gassing and was now dismantling the entire deck, as earlier he had begun to dismantle Deck 25. On receiving Complain’s message from Vyann, he had flung himself into the work with a ferocity terrible to watch.

  His first move had been to have executed without further ado the two women and four men whom Pagwam, with some of the Survival Team, had found wearing the octagonal ring of the Outsiders. Under his insensate direction, as Complain had predicted, the turbulence of Hawl and his fellow brigands had been curbed — or, rather, canalized into less randomly destructive paths. With Gregg, his face and arm stump bandaged, out of the way, Hawl readily took his place; his shrunken face gleamed with pleasure as he worked the heat gun. The rest of Gregg’s mob worked willingly with him, unhampered by the lack of gravity. It was not that they obeyed Hawl, but that his demoniac will was theirs.

  What had once been a neat honeycomb of corridor and living accommodation, now, in the light of many torches, looked like a scene from some fantastic everglades, cast in bronze. Throughout the cleared space — cleared though much of the metal was live enough with runaway voltage to make five dead men — girders of tough hull metal, the very skeleton of the ship, jutted solidly in all directions. From them projected icicles of lighter metals and plastics which had melted, dripped and then again solidified. And through all this chaos ran the water from burst mains.

  Perhaps of the whole wild scene, the sight of the water was the strangest. Although its momentum carried it forward, bursting out into non-gravity, it showed an inclination to go nowhere and form into globules. But the conflagration started on decks 23 and 24 was now an inferno, which set up on either side of it waves of air within whose eddies the globules whirled and elongated like crazy glass fish.

  ‘I think we got ’em Giants cornered there, my boys!’ Hawl shouted. ‘There’s blood to fill your supper bowls with this sleep.’ With practised aim he sliced down one more partition. Shouts of excitement went up from the men round him. They worked tirelessly, swooping among the iron carcass.

  Vyann could not stay there watching Scoyt. The lines on his face, rendered terrible by torch- and fire-light, had not softened under the breakdown of gravity. They looked no
w deeper than ever; for Scoyt, this dissection of the body in which he lived was a traumatic experience. This was what his relentless pursuit of a foe had crumbled to, and in the little frenzied Hawl it found external incarnation.

  Profoundly saddened, the girl turned away. She glanced about for Tregonnin; he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was fluttering alone in his apartments, a little man who knew truth without being able to convey it. She had to go to Roy Complain; the way she felt at the moment, only his face still wore the mask of humanity. Amid the clamour of demolition, quietly, she saw why she loved Complain; it was because (and this was something both were aware of, though neither spoke of it) Complain had changed, Vyann being both a witness of and a factor in the change. In this hour, many people — Scoyt for one — were changing, sloughing off the ancient moulds of repression even as Complain had done: but whereas they were changing into lower beings, Roy Complain’s metamorphosis lifted him to a higher sphere.

  Decks 19 and 18 were packed with people, all ominously waiting for a climax they could but dimly sense. Beyond them, Vyann found the upper levels deserted as she made her way forward. Although the dark sleep-wake was over, the lights of the ship — hitherto as dependable as the sunrise — had failed to come on again; Vyann switched on the torch at her belt and carried her dazer in her hand.

  On Deck 15, she paused.

  A dim, rosy light filled the corridor, very subtle and soft. It emanated from one of the open trap-doors in the deck. As Vyann looked at the trap, a creature emerged slowly and painfully: a rat. At some time past, its back had been broken; now, a kind of rough sledge, on which its hind legs rested, was lashed across its rump. It pulled itself along with its forelegs, the sledge easing its progress.

  Vyann thought, surprising herself: ‘How long before they discover the wheel?’

  Just after the rat emerged from the trap, the glow burst into brightness. A pillar of fire leapt out of the hole, fell, and then rose more steadily. Frightened, Vyann skirted it, hurrying on, keeping pace with the rat who, after one glance at her, pressed on without interest. A poignant illusion of mutual torment relieved Vyann’s customary revulsion for the creatures.

  Naked fire was not a thing the ship’s company much concerned themselves with. Now, for the first time, Vyann realized it could destroy them utterly — and nobody was doing a thing about it. It was spreading between levels, like a cancerous finger; when they realized its danger, it would be too late. She walked more rapidly, gnawing her ripe lower lip, feeling the deck hot beneath her feet.

  Suddenly, the crippled rat, not two yards ahead of her, coughed and lay still.

  ‘Vyann!’ a voice said behind her.

  She wheeled like a startled deer.

  Gregg stood there, putting away his dazer. Following her silently down the corridor, he had been unable to resist killing the rat. With his head swathed in bandages, he was hardly recognizable; the remnant of his left arm was also bandaged and strapped across his shirt. In the ruddy dark, he did not make a companionable figure.

  Vyann could not repress a shiver of fright at the stealth of his appearance. If she, for any reason, should wish to cry for help, nobody would hear her in this lost corner of the ship.

  He came up and touched her arm. She could see his lips among the swathes of bandage.

  ‘I want to come with you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I followed you through the crowd — I was no use back there like this.’

  ‘Why did you follow me?’ she asked, withdrawing her arm.

  She thought he smiled beneath his lint visor.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong,’ he said, very quietly. When he saw she did not understand, he added, ‘In the ship, I mean. We’re all for it now. This is Lights Out. You can feel it down in your bones… Let me come with you, Laur; you’re so… Oh, come on, it’s getting hot.’

  She moved ahead without speaking. For some reason, her eyes stung with tears; they were, after all, all in the same boat.

  While Marapper was making his prostrations over the burnt-out body of Zac Deight, Complain roved round the air lock, gauging its possibilities. If the Giants were coming up from Earth in force, this place had to be defended, and that must be the first thing to worry about. A flush-fitting door, leading to an ante-room in the lock, stood in one wall; Complain pulled it open. It was a mere cubicle from which control could be kept over what came and went in the lock itself. Now, a man lay in it on a rough bunk.

  It was Bob Fermour!

  He greeted his ex-companion with terror, having heard through an open air valve all that had transpired on the other side of the door. The gentle interrogations of Scoyt and his friends, rapidly interrupted though they had been by the Giants coming to his deliverance, had removed most of the skin from Fermour’s back, as well as a percentage of his moral fibre. He had been left cowering here, while his rescuers returned to Curtis, to wait for a relief ship to come and take him home; now he was convinced he was about to make the Long Journey.

  ‘Don’t hurt me, Roy!’ he begged. ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know — things you never guessed. Then you won’t want to kill me!’

  ‘I can’t wait to hear,’ Complain said grimly. ‘But you’re coming straight back to the Council to tell them: I find it dangerous to be the only one who receives these confidences.’

  ‘Not back into the ship, Roy, please, I beg you. I’ve had enough of it all. I can’t face it again.’

  ‘Get up!’ Complain said. Seizing Fermour by the wrist, he swung him up and pushed him into the air lock. Then he kicked Marapper gently in his ample, episcopal buttocks.

  ‘You ought to have grown out of that mumbo jumbo, priest,’ he said. ‘Besides, we’ve no time to waste. We shall have to get Scoyt and Gregg and everyone here to this deck for a mass attack when the Giants arrive. Our only hope, that I can see, is to seize their ship when it comes.’

  Red-faced, the priest rose, dusting off his knees and banging dandruff from his shoulders. He manoeuvred so that Complain stood between him and Fermour, avoiding the latter as if he had been a ghost.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said to Complain. ‘Although as a man of peace, I greatly regret all this bloodshed. We must pray to Consciousness that the blood may be theirs, rather than ours.’

  Leaving the old councillor to lie where he had fallen, they prodded Fermour out of the lock and back towards the trapdoor in the littered corridor. As they went, a strange noise haunted their ears. At the trap, halting in apprehension, they found the origin of the sound. Beneath their feet, swarming along the inspection way, was a host of rats. Some of them glanced pinkly up at Marapper’s torch; none faltered in their rapid advance towards the bow of the ship. Brown rats, small rats, grey rats, tawny rats, some with belongings strapped to their backs, hurried to the pipe of fear.

  ‘We can’t get down there!’ Complain said. His stomach twisted at the idea.

  The ominous thing was the determined way the swarm moved as if nothing could divert it. It looked as if it might pour on beneath their feet forever.

  ‘Something really devastating must be happening in the ship!’ Fermour exclaimed. In that ghastly fur river, he drowned his last fear of those who had once been his friends. This united them again.

  ‘There’s a tool kit in the air lock cubicle,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get it. There should be a saw in it. With that, we can cut our way back to the main part of the ship.’

  He ran back the way they had come, returning with a clanking bag. Fumbling it open, he produced an atomic hand saw with a circular blade field; it crumbled away the molecular structure of a wall before their eyes. With a shrill grinding sound, the instrument bit out a shaky circle in the metal. They ducked through it, working their way almost by instinct to a known part of the deck. As if the ship had come to life while they were in the air lock, a faint hammering filled everywhere like an irregular heartbeat; Scoyt’s wreckers were busily at work. The air as they walked grew staler, the dark was hazed with smoke — and a fa
miliar voice was calling for Complain.

  In another moment, they rounded a bend at a trot, and there were Vyann and Gregg. The girl threw herself into Complain’s arms.

  Hurriedly, he gave her his news. She told him of the devastation being wrought on the twenties decks. Even as she spoke, the lights about them glowed suddenly to great brilliance, then died, even the pilot lights fading completely out. At the same time, the gravity blew; they sprawled uncomfortably in mid-air.

  Welling, it seemed, from the lungs of a whale, a groan rattled down the confines of the ship. For the very first time, they perceived the vessel to give a lurch.

  ‘The ship’s doomed!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Those fools are destroying it! You’ve got nothing to fear from the Giants now — by the time they get here, they’ll be a rescue party, picking desiccated bodies out of a wreck.’

  ‘You’ll never drag Roger Scoyt from the job he’s doing,’ Vyann said grimly.

  ‘Holy smother!’ Complain said. ‘This whole situation is just hopeless!’

  ‘The human predicament apart,’ Marapper said, ‘nothing is hopeless. As I see it, we’d be safest in the Control Room. If I can only control my feet, that’s where I’m going.’

  ‘Good idea, priest,’ Gregg said. ‘I’ve had enough of burning. It would be the safest place for Vyann, too.’

  ‘The Control Room!’ Fermour said. ‘Yes, of course…’

  Complain said nothing, silently abandoning his plan to take Fermour before the Council; the hour was too late. Nor did there seem, in the circumstances, any hope of repelling the Giants.

  Clumsily, with agonizing slowness, the party covered the nine decks which lay between them and the blister housing the ruined controls. At last they hauled themselves panting up the spiral stairs and through the hole Vyann and Complain had made earlier.

  ‘That’s funny,’ Marapper said. ‘Five of us started out from Quarters to reach this place: finally, three of us have done it together!’

  ‘Much good may it do us,’ Complain said. ‘I never knew why I followed you, priest.’