The Watch Below (18 page)

There was a long silence, broken by Arthur who said, "I agree with you
completely Irene. That's why I mentioned my second-best idea first. The
other one involves no children, but we would have to use Richard's Hole
for purposes other than the one for which it was intended. . . ."
The doctor listened without interrupting while Arthur Sullivan Wallis
expanded on his best idea, thinking that a person less timid than himself
would have been laying down the law in no uncertain terms after the first
few sentences. Even so, when he did finally speak, Dr. Kimball Bush
Dickson thought that his voice carried a little of the rasp possessed
by the first doctor when someone was being wilfully stupid.
He said, "The bilges are impassable, Arthur, you
know
that! We've been
told that people have died cleaning out the bilges on ships like this:
They lost their way among the intercostal spaces and couldn't find the
way back to the entry point. Even with lights and the bilge water only
a few inches deep it would be next to impossible to travel half the
length of the ship through the space between the double bottom -- it's
too tight a squeeze, for one thing. In pitch darkness with the bilges
completely under water and dragging an air hose and trying to hold your
helmet vertical all the time -- !"
"I'll be careful with the hose," said Arthur, in a voice which must have
been identical to that used by his ancestor Richard when his seniors
were trying to argue him out of opening up the Rooms, "and the helmet
will be tied to my shoulders. The idea is to use a bucket filled with
air fed through the hose from the hole. It will be open at the bottom so
that I'll have to keep my head upright to keep the air from spilling out,
and there will be no need of a visor because it will be dark anyway.
"I've thought about this for a long time," he went on seriously,
"and have decided to try for the stern opening. The torpedo which hit
the bow opened the forepeak, and to reach there would mean climbing up
through the forward coffer dam, which is thought to be badly damaged
and perhaps blocked with wreckage. The second torpedo struck below the
waterline astern, and its opening is much closer to the Hole -- "
"You've thought about it," the doctor broke in, "but not enough, obviously!
Did you think about the scavengers we see in the Hole? They're all
small
fish, not more than two inches across. If nothing bigger can get in, how
are you going to get out?"
Arthur's teeth glowed briefly in the dark as he smiled. "Maybe the bigger
fish aren't interested in getting in, Doctor, when there are so many small
fish more easily goi at outside."
"Doesn't it bother you," said the doctor, trying another tack, "that during
the first dozen yards of your journey you will be crawling through the bones
of all the people who have died in the ship? Some of them have died quite
recently and the scavengers might not have finished with them. . . ."
"Now," said Arthur scornfully, "you're beginning to sound like my father
recalling an Edgar Allan Poe -- "
The doctor kept on arguing, off and on, until the day early in the
following spring when Arthur Wallis and Randy Dickson, who was to see
to the paying out of the hose, made the escape attempt, even though he
had realized long since that he was simply wasting his breath.
The long, narrow, rusting world of Gulf Trader lay cold and dark and silent.
With both its generators still and the women moved far forward into One
with orders to keep the children quiet at all costs, the only sounds in
the ship were made by Arthur's bucket helmet scraping the other side
of the deck beneath their feet. Barefoot, shivering, and speaking in
whispers if they spoke at all, they traced Arthur's slow progress from
Richard's Hole to the intercostals under Eleven. At that point he was
more than halfway to the holed stern, with just the spaces under Twelve,
the aft coffer dam, the fuel bunker, and the more confined spaces under
the engine-room flat still to go. But it was at that point that something
went wrong.
The scraping of Arthur's helmet against the metal floor became louder
and more erratic, and there was a softer, muffled sound as if he might
have been banging on the plating with his fists. Shortly afterwards the
noises stopped.
XVIII
Somebody had committed the unforgivable crime of moving a packing case
without previously notifying the change of position. The case could
very well have been moved accidentally by one of the children playing,
although none of them would admit to doing so, and the change of position
was less than two yards. But Irene MacDougall Wallis walked into it in the
dark and painfully bruised her knee and thigh. The pain and the fright and
the recent death of her brother Arthur under Tank Eleven all contributed
to what happened then.
The split began because of Irene's insistence that the case had been moved
deliberately, with malice aforethought, and that its movement constituted
an act of violence on someone's part, and she further insisted that the
someone in question could only be one or more of the seniors. Until then
the history of the ship had been free from violence -- the small domestic
rows did not count, being purely verbal affairs -- so that the incident
of the packing case caused a lot of bad feeling. Despite the efforts of
the doctor, the rift could not be closed, and gradually the young people
moved their living quarters aft. They started their own garden in Eleven,
and they organized their own Game.
They took their turn on the generator and occasionally, when the Seniors
wanted to dig out an operetta or a Shakespeare, they would send a couple
of good voices to complete the cast. There was very little said, however,
during generator duty and the exchanges of talent became fewer. Inevitably
the Young People grew old themselves and had difficult, rebellious young
people of their own to contend with, but the common ground of parenthood
was not enough to close the widening rift between the two factions. All
the knowledge of the original survivors together with the intervening
ship history was available to both groups by way of the Game, but now
history was beginning to diverge.
There were no further acts of violence, however, although the deaths
directly attributable to the split grew at an alarming rate -- at least
the doctors, who traditionally had a foot in each camp, found them so. The
stern section was the coldest part of the ship and damp and corrosion
had taken the strongest hold there. Infant mortality was high and the
adults rarely lived beyond the mid-fifties. And in each generation there
was at least one young, intelligent, and relatively healthy boy or girl
who died, like Arthur Sullivan Wallis, in the frigid darkness of the
bilges trying to escape from the only world they knew.
And far, far above them other men and women were escaping from their world,
to places like the Moon and Mars and the Jovian satellites. Some of them
died, too.
The third and final expedition against the food ship led by Captain
Deslann the Fifth hung like a slow-moving shoal of fish between the
flagship and the target vessel. Unlike the tiny creatures which their
ancestors had known on Untha, these fish had to carry a little of their
ocean with them, and there was barely enough of it to take them to the
enemy ship. That was one of the reasons why peace talks were at the moment
still going on between the enemy captain and his senior communications
officer -- so Deslann Five thought cynically as the two voices sounded in
his suit communicator. His enemy counterpart was old and short-tempered
and male like himself while the comm officer was very young and female
and unusually well gifted with intelligence and self-assurance, so that
the combination was unlikely to produce a peaceful settlement to their
problem. It might, however, cause enough of a diversion in the enemy
ship to allow the expedition to land undetected.
Deslann Five had to remind himself firmly that he was on the side of
Right, otherwise his feelings of shame would have reached uncomfortable
proportions.
"Asking about the health of our children," Captain Hellseggorn in the
food ship was saying angrily, "is merely a preliminary to inquiring
about the number of them, which is a transparent attempt to discover
the probable strength of the present adult population. Do you think
we are stupid? The children are doing well -- they get enough meat,
you see -- and the number of adults, while less than yours, since over
here we don't proliferate like wild rulties, is sufficient. We are not
going back to the flagship, and if you try forcing us to do so you will
find it as effective as your present stupid arguments!
"Why don't you simply ask for food, which is what you really want?"
Hellseggorn went on. "The answer will still be 'No,' of course, because
you wouldn't stop at taking food. Our ancestors escaped your brand of
fanaticism six generations ago, and I will not allow any of my people
to be reconverted to that . . . that . . ."
"The discipline isn't nearly so strict now," the quiet, feminine,
maddeningly reasonable voice from the flagship broke in. "We no longer
insist on six or more trainees for every post, and the captain's position,
which is the most important, has only two understudies. And we realize,
sir, that it was the too-rigid insistence on purely technical training
which drove your forebears into living on the food ship. We did not
expect them to cut down on the supply of meat, which aggravated the
situation. Especially as your ship is so packed with food animals that
you could never eat your way through them in a hundred generations. But
now there is ample opportunity for cultural as well as technical studies,
so that you no longer have anything to fear in that respect."
If he had not had this ridiculous feeling of shame over what they were
doing, the captain would have admired the smooth manner in which the young
female was moving from a criticism of Hellseggorn's ancestors and her
own to a criticism of Hellseggorn himself. The water in the food ship's
control room had been heated, by now it must be coming close to the boil.
"You are intelligent enough without doubt," she went on, in a tone which
was pleasant but just a shade doubtful, "to realize that we can bring
another food ship to ourselves if the situation warrants it, and ignore
you. But we did not wish to ignore you or to waste another ship whose
animals are needed to populate the seas of the target world with a food
supply which we can be sure will suit our metabolism. We want you to be
reunited with us, and soon.
"We are approaching the target sun."
There was a moment's silence, then Hellseggorn said furiously, "We have
been approaching the target sun since the moment of take-off, and all
these arguments have been used, with very few variations, on my parents
and grandparents, and they have invariably ended with the climactic piece
of data that the target sun was practically warming up our nose cones --
a piece of data at which, apparently, we were expected to tie ourselves
in knots and blow green bubbles from sheer ecstasy. All it did then,
and does now, is make us angrier! Lying is bad enough, but a lie as
unoriginal as that is an insult to the intelligence!
"I am breaking contact -- "
"No, wait!" said the flagship urgently. "This is all true, sir! You know
that your ship was meant to be a sub-fleet leader with a crew of three
but was later changed to an unmanned slave under the control of the
flagship. Your control room has manual overrides for certain internal
controls -- lighting, warming, and jettisoning the cargo -- which had
to be tested during the final stages of construction. But you have no
control of your main drive, neither have you any means of seeing outside
your ship -- "
"We can't see," Hellseggorn shouted, "so if you tell us space is bright
pink with yellow stars we must believe you!" He added a remark very rarely
made by a male Unthan toward a female of the species, dealing as it did
with certain abnormal methods of reproduction.
"Personally I don't care if you believe me or not!" the comm officer
shouted back. She was really angry now, and not just baiting him. "We
are getting close to the target sun! We are
not
interested in you
solely because of your food supply, although meat would certainly improve
our health. Our main concern is for your children. . . ."
Deslann Five thudded gently into the vast wall that was the food ship's
side, and wriggled until all his padded magnets were in contact with the
plating. By that time the rest of his party, all twenty-eight of them,
had also arrived and secured themselves. As quickly as possible they
moved to the midships lock, a personnel lock used when the ship had been
abuilding in orbit around Untha, and began opening its outer seal. What
they were doing might very well be registering on the control-room
telltales, but they hoped nobody was looking at them. Their water was
beginning to taste stale.
". . . Our healers feel strongly about this," the angry female voice
was saying, "and so do I! It's an unnatural life for any child, or an
adult for that matter. The low temperature, for one thing, must have an
inhibiting effect on their intelligence -- this is a known and accepted
fact, our healers say. And with all respect, sir, since you had no control
over your childhood environment, I suggest that your own inability to
grasp . . ."
The water in the food ship's control room exploded into steam at that point,
metaphorically speaking, as Hellseggorn reacted to the suggestion that he
was mentally retarded. Deslann and his party were packed into the lock,
outer seal closed and inner seal open, directing as many cutting beams
as could be brought to bear on the ice on the other side. In their case
the explosions of steam, mixed with hot water and chunks of melting ice,
made the metaphor almost literally true.
Deslann Five stayed in the lock while the others went to extend their
bridgehead. He was trying to find the connection to the lock's outside
antenna so as to reestablish contact with the flagship, lost when they
had penetrated the metal hull of the food ship. When he discovered
it and plugged it in, he found his communications officer speaking on
another wavelength.