This time they set off as a group to the far end of the chamber, helping each other over fallen branches and taking it in turns to carry the heavy canister.
As they made their way back to the far end of the chamber, Glyn gave the Captain a running commentary of their progress and the degree of increasing decay they observed as they went down the pathway, hoping the information would be of some use.
When they had gone as far as it was deemed safe to go and with what they thought was the end of the chamber in sight, they halted, informed the Captain that they were about to release whatever it was the canister held, and prepared to walk back the way they had come.
Bolin removed the end of the canister as instructed, turned the valve and held the canister as high as he could.
‘Someone else will have to press the release button, I can’t reach it and hold this damn thing at the same time.’
Brendon stepped forward a couple of paces, thought better of it, and stayed put.
‘OK, I’ll do it.’ said Glyn stepping up to the nervous looking Bolin. He pressed the button and stepped back in one fluid movement, as if expecting the canister to come alive. All that happened was a faint hissing sound and an almost invisible stream of vapour jetting high up into the air.
‘Looks harmless enough, but I wouldn’t count on it.’ Glyn felt something should be said, if only to ease the tension they all felt.
Slowly they made their way back towards the entrance point of the chamber, helping Bolin with his canister wherever a branch got in the way or a pool of slime had to be trodden in, as the fluid from the decaying vegetation dripped down from the rotting branches at an ever increasing rate.
Glyn kept the Captain informed of their progress as they went along until they neared the end of the pathway by the entrance, and then disaster struck.
A large branch fell from high above, knocking Bolin off his feet and sending the canister spinning into the slimy mass of decay at the side of the path. As he fell his arm caught on one of the steel posts which marked the edge of the path, ripping the suit open and exposing bare flesh.
As the others crowded around him, a thin trickle of blood appeared and a look of horror flashed across Bolin’s face.
Glyn quickly told the Captain what had happened, but there was no reply for a moment.
‘Come on Captain, what do we do now? Bolin’s been injured, what should we do?’
‘Recover the canister and go to the end of the chamber. It is vital that the operation be completed. Do it now.’
‘But what about Bolin?’
‘Recover the canister....’ the Captain just repeated his former order.
Arki squelched his way into the morass at the side of the path, recovered the canister, and holding it as high as he could walked on up the path, cursing under his breath.
Bolin was looking decidedly sick inside his face mask, his skin had taken on a pale grey colour and he was trembling.
‘Bolin, can you hear me? Stand up, come on, stand up.’ but Glyn was wasting his breath, Bolin slowly slipped into unconsciousness and slithered from their grasp to lie on the pathway in a crumpled heap.
‘Is he dead?’ asked an equally pale Brendon.
‘No, I don’t think so, but he’s very sick. We must try and get him back to our quarters as quickly as possible, someone may know what to do.’ although in all honesty, Glyn didn’t think anyone would.
‘Captain, what can we do for Bolin?’ asked Arki, returning to the group and not really expecting a reply.
‘What has happened to him?’ came back loud and clear.
‘He fell against a steel post and gashed his suit, he also cut his arm on it and now he’s unconscious, what should we do?’ Arki was getting irritated at having to repeat himself.
‘There is nothing anyone can do for him. The spray from the canister must have got into his blood stream. He will die very soon and his body will disintegrate. Please place his body on the side of the pathway and it will be disposed of along with the vegetation.’
They looked at one another in sheer disbelief that the Captain could be so callous and uncaring towards one of them, it was his duty to look after them, or so they thought.
‘We can’t just leave him here.’ Brendon said, his voice sounding lumpy and strained over the radio link.
‘It looks as if we shall have to. We don’t know what’s wrong with him, and I doubt if anyone else does. If the spray has killed him, and that’s what the Captain implied, then he will be carrying whatever it is in his body, and that could then spread to the rest of us if we take him out of his suit.’
Glyn was having trouble making his voice sound level and normal due to the lump in his throat.
Arki lifted the unfortunate man’s arm to look at the wound, and a thin stream of brown fluid poured out causing him to drop it and jump back quickly.
‘Whatever that stuff is, it certainly works quickly.’ he said, and then they looked at the forest of vegetation down through the length of the huge chamber.
It had crumbled into a limp mass of soggy twisted branches with hardly a leaf in sight, both sides of the pathway seemed to be alive as the few remaining weakened branches bent under their own weight, wriggling and twisting against each other as they slumped downwards to join the writhing mass of slush on the floor of the chamber.
‘I think we had better get out of here as soon as possible, we’ve done our job, at some cost, so I’ll check with the Captain to see if we can go.’ Glyn said, but before anyone could agree or otherwise, the Captain’s voice boomed back,
‘You must all leave the chamber now and go to the decontamination room, I will direct you there. This chamber will be flushed out as soon as the last few branches have been turned into liquid form, and you would not be able to survive that.’
Bolin’s head was lying at an awkward angle and Arki bent to straighten it out, at least it would look better, he thought. As he lifted the head, several litres of brown fluid poured out of the split in the arm rent and all three nearly lost the remains of their breakfast.
That was enough, and they struggled to pick up their equipment along with Bolin’s, and headed for the exit as quickly as was decently possible.
‘Please enter the lift. You will be taken to a decontamination point. Please make sure you have all your issued equipment with you, nothing must be left behind.’
‘What about Bolin?’ asked Brendon.
‘There is nothing we can do for Bolin, as the Captain said. He is dead. And now his body will be returned to the recycling unit.’
‘I can’t see the Captain going in there to fish his body out, so that must mean that everything in there will be turned into a liquid and then recycled. I don’t like the sound of that somehow.’
‘It’s normal procedure Arki, if you think about it. All our unwanted materials go to the recycling unit, including us, if the truth were known.’ said Glyn, trying to add a note of calm to the situation.
‘When people die, they go to the room of rest.’ Brendon interjected, a nervous tone to his voice as if a long held myth was about to be exposed for what it was.
‘Of course they do,’ Glyn replied, ‘but where do you think they go after that? Everything has to be recycled, or there wouldn’t be anything left after a few years.’
They all really knew what happened, it was just that some didn’t want to think about it in any detail.
The lift door obligingly opened at their approach and they all crowded in, the door hissed to and Glyn automatically shuffled around to reach the control buttons.
‘I don’t see anything marked decontamination, so what do we do now?’ he asked.
‘You will be taken to decontamination.’ The voice of the Captain boomed in the confined space of the lift cubicle. ‘It is completely automatic.’ And the lift began to move.
The door opened into a larger cubicle into which they all trooped, glad of a bit more space to move around in.
‘What happens to us now?’ wh
impered Brendon, looking around anxiously at a cage like structure against the far wall.
‘Be patient, the Captain will tell us.’ replied Glyn, placing a hand on Brendon’s shoulder, which made him jump.
‘Please enter the cage in front of you. Place your equipment evenly over the floor of the cage. You will be submerged in a decontamination fluid. It is quite safe. You have your own air supply contained within the structure of your suits. When the fluid is over your heads, please rotate on the spot, raising your arms above your head.’ The command level of the Captain’s voice had gone up a couple of notches, and they all trooped obediently forward, doing as instructed.
The cage door slid to behind them with a clank, and a sudden jerk indicated that they were on their way down into the darkness below.
As the cage descended, a milky white fluid surged up around their feet, foaming as it raced around any obstacles in its path. Brendon had now gone a very pale shade of grey as the light disappeared to be replaced with the seething decontamination fluid.
As it closed over their heads they could feel the fluid being pulsed in a series of powerful jets pushing against their bodies, making it difficult to retain their positions without bumping into each other in the confined space.
Raising their arms above their heads and rotating as instructed, proved even more difficult as their feet kept tripping over the equipment on the floor of the cage.
Without warning the fluid level dropped, light returned and they stood looking at each other, their vision distorted by the milky fluid still clinging to their face plates.
‘Thank goodness that’s over.’ Glyn said over his radio link, but no sooner had the words been uttered when a fresh surge of clear fluid foamed up around their feet, and they were soon submerged again.
The pulsing jets began again, and they obediently raised their arms and rotated. Glyn wondered what they must have looked like to an observer, concluding that the word must have been ridiculous.
When the pulsing stopped, it was replaced by a low frequency vibration which seemed to penetrate their very bodies, making them feel sick, and that caused a considerable amount of concern as they could well choke within the confines of their helmets.
The fluid drained away again, the cage rose up to the level above and the door slid back, inviting them to leave the cage, not that any encouragement was really needed.
Somewhere a fan started up, the whine of the blades rising to a crescendo as a blast of hot air buffeted them about, and they rotated once more with their arms vertical.
When whatever it was had decided they were sufficiently dry, the fan was cut off and all was quiet again.
‘When the tone sounds, please close your eyes tightly. Do not look at the light source, it will damage your retinas beyond repair.’ In a way, it was comforting to hear the voice of the Captain again, Glyn thought.
The ‘ping’ sounded, and they screwed their eyes as tightly shut as it was humanly possible to do as a searing blast of blue white light hit them with what seemed like almost physical force.
The light switched off, and they were left in what seemed to be total darkness, but slowly their vision returned and a sigh of relief echoed around the radio links.
‘You are now decontaminated. Please return your apparatus to the equipment room. Your exit from this room is opposite to that which you entered from. You will be guided back to your quarters.’
‘Thank you for your co-operation, that is all.’ The faintest of clicks indicated that the Captain was no longer on line, and they were alone in the bowls of the great ship.
‘I hope the device which gives directions hasn’t broken down,’ Arki offered, ‘or we shall be in real trouble.’ Before anyone could answer the door slid open to reveal a dark passage ahead, and they hesitatingly moved forward thinking over what Arki had said.
The door of the decontamination room slid to behind them with a definite click, and they knew there was no way back in as there were no controls on what now looked like a normal passage wall, and there was no sign of where the doorway had been.
The corridor ran to left and right, the left section being more brightly lit, so they headed along it, hoping they were doing the right thing.
They had been walking for some minutes when a section of the corridor wall slid back, and they all stopped.
‘I suppose we are intended to go in,’ Glyn commented, ‘I don’t go much on the ‘directions’ we are supposed to receive.’
There was nowhere else to go as the lights up ahead in the corridor had dimmed, the lift now offering the only fully lighted area.
This time they felt the surge as the lift went upwards, stopped, moved sideways, changed directions several times and then went up again.
When the door opened into a now familiar section of the ship, they were totally confused as to where they had been, and feeling not a little dizzy.
‘Thank goodness we’re back in one piece, I really didn’t think we’d make it.’ Brendon said, smiling for the first time since breakfast. Glyn gave him a pat on the back and said,
‘We’d better report back to the others and tell them what’s happened to Bolin. Let’s dump the equipment and then it will almost be time for the next meal, so we can tell them then.’ Without realizing it, Glyn had taken full control over the little group, and they had accepted it quite naturally.
After laying out their equipment on the long bench like shelf along one wall of the equipment room, they left it for the machinery to check over and store in the appropriate sections for reuse at a later date.
A few diners had arrived when the trio trooped in, and Glyn said that it would be best to wait for all to assemble before relating what had happened, and the others agreed.
Slowly the room filled up with the other members of the ship, and when all were seated Glyn stood up to make his announcement.
‘I have some sad news for you all. Bolin is no longer with us. He had an accident down in the hydroponics chamber, and there was nothing we could do to help him, even the Captain couldn’t help. I won’t go into the unpleasant details of what happened, but he is no more, and as far as we can tell, didn’t suffer much. He will be missed by us all, I’m sure, and as we can’t say farewell to him in the normal manner, I suggest we hold a one minute silence, and think about him.’
After the look of shock had passed, they bowed their heads and a minute of silence began, extending into several minutes as no one wanted to be the first to break what little respect they could pay to a much loved member of the ship.
Most of the meal was eaten in silence, and it wasn’t until after the fruit bowl had been passed around did any real conversation take place, and then it was only of a trivial nature. It was a rare thing to lose someone accidentally.
Fortunately no one asked Glyn for details of what happened to Bolin, and he was glad, as he didn’t want to go through the horror of the incident again.
As the meal time break ended and the diners departed to go their various ways, Mia turned towards Glyn and asked him, ‘Will you be going to the sunning room, dear? You missed your session this morning.’
‘No I don’t think so, I’d rather go to the book room, there’s something I want to find out and it may be in one of the books.’ He replied, not that he had anything specific in mind, but he wanted to be alone for a while, there were things to think about and he didn’t want any interruptions. She just nodded and smiled. He sometimes wished she would show a little more interest in life, a little more spark.
The first time he had gone to the book room he had some difficulty in finding it, but this time he suddenly found himself there, not being aware of the journey apart from the last few metres.
The fact that he had to suit up again didn’t seem to matter this time, and he went into the main room and sat down. Just what was it he wanted to find out? He wasn’t sure, but he felt it had something to do with the Captain, but what? He felt quite sure that the Captain was just an extension of the computer sy
stem which ran the ship, similar in a way to Teacher and Medic before they had ceased to function.
He began a random selection of the books, one here, one there, finding the contents of most of them interesting, but nothing really grabbed his attention.
A systematic search was the only way he was going to find what he thought he wanted, and so he pulled the chair over to the narrow end of the room, climbed up, and began checking each book in turn.
There was a lot of information here he thought, but virtually nothing pertinent to the ship or how it was run. It was when he reached the last book on the top shelf that he came upon the first clue in his search.
The title on the spine ‘Cement manufacture in the twentieth century’ seemed an odd selection for a book representative of Earth’s history, so he pulled it out to take a quick look at its contents.
A small clasp held the book closed, and he returned to the table to try and release it. Why should a book, which was intended to be read, have a clasp to seal its contents? He felt his heart beat a little faster, surely this couldn’t be just another ordinary book, and he fiddled with the clasp until it suddenly sprang open, and the contents were exposed.
He had been right, this was no ordinary book, but one made up from separate sheets laced together and placed in the cover of a book whose contents had been removed.
It was hand written in a clear script which made easy reading, and he dragged the chair back to the table, sat down and almost reverently turned the first page.
‘My name is Jon Silworth, I am twenty four years old, and of the third generation on board this great ship which is into its one hundred and twelfth year in its mission to find mankind a new home among the stars.
According to the Teacher, which is a computer driven device intended to educate the new born, the ship was built by a consortium of very wealthy and philanthropic individuals who foresaw the demise of mankind on planet Earth.
The main reason for writing this record of our lives here is so that if anything should go wrong with the system, then those who are to come will have a record of things as we have seen them, and the purpose of this great venture.
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