The Watch Below (20 page)

The deck and wall plating of all the tanks were red and gritty with rust,
except for one wall of the generator room which was kept clean and smooth
for purposes of education. In the condensation which formed there every
day was written the alphabet or passages from books, or pictures or
characters out of stories, or completely original compositions of words
or pictures. And the Game itself was taking on a new and original dimension.
As well as operetta, plays, stories, and sections of ship history being
sung and acted out there was the exciting exploratory work being done
on the probable background and motivation of subsidiary characters,
particularly villains and extraterrestrials whose characterization
always had been unsatisfactory from the point of view of credibility and
depth. Some of this work was the most amusing, stimulating, and downright
rewarding that had ever been done on the ship. Still, the renaissance
did not stop short at the purely intellectual and artistic exercises of
the Game.
During the months of summer they spent a few minutes each day hammering out
an SOS on the hull. They felt a little ridiculous doing this, but in some
obscure fashion it strengthened their faith in a world outside themselves
and their ship. The insulation of their wiring kept rotting and peeling
away, causing shorts and blowing out bulbs that were in terribly short
supply, and leaving the ship without light for days on end. An ambitious
project for rewiring the tanks and rebuilding the generator was initiated
and carried through to a successful conclusion. Only three of the tanks
were being lit while two sections of the garden were allowed to die in
darkness, for so much of the wiring had to be discarded as useless;
however, there were nowhere near as many people as there had been in
the old days and fewer lighting points meant fewer bulbs wasted.
Another daring attempt, based on the facts that glass is a good conductor
of heat and that plant life tends to wither and die when subject to a sudden
rise in temperature, gave the ship back its sight: There had been a real
danger of cracking the porthole glass and flooding Richard's Rooms and
the whole of Number Twelve below them if heat from a fire had been applied
too quickly; but instead the green scum that had gathered on the outside
of the ports had turned yellow and peeled away. If they were willing to
brave the cold and damp of the Rooms, and many of them were, they'd be
able to look out at the rocks and sandy bottom and up at the restless,
wrinkled sky or watch inquisitive fish watching them. . . .
They even ran a light to the Rooms, using the best of the discarded
wiring and being especially careful to protect the circuit with fuses
so that the precious light bulbs would not suffer. The light was to be
used only in an emergency, for signaling purposes.
The rust was everywhere and it abraded his bare feet as he walked,
but the doctor could remember it no other way, and the seams of the
tank plating sweated constantly as the water outside tried to push
its way through. That also was normal, although it was said that in
the good old days the tank walls were clean and bone dry. The tanks
themselves were supposed to have been filled with bright, clean tools
and equipment, their floors hidden under an eight- or ten-foot layer of
foodstuffs and heaps of soft, warm sacking lying about simply for the
picking up. Now the tanks were empty except for the heaps of rusting,
useless junk piled in the corners, and the small area in Seven where
their remaining store of food was kept. With lighting restricted to three
tanks, the two remaining gardens were needed for photosynthesis rather
than to eke out their dwindling food supply. Then there were the light
bulbs and the increasingly difficult jobs of processing drinking water
and finding lubrication for the generator.
But these were all the old, accepted, everyday problems. The doctor was
aware that the ship, like everyone in it, would die someday. But no sane
person -- and the inhabitants of Gulf Trader were sane, the Game saw
to that -- would ruin his or her whole life by worrying over the last
few minutes of it. In actual fact there was nothing for any of them to
complain about.
Altogether this was a happy, exciting time to be living in, and at nineteen
James Eichlan Wallis felt very glad that he had been born when he had.
The target sun was so close that the small telescope in the flagship
was able to resolve the tiny blurs representing its planets. But the
framework of the infinitely larger and more sensitive instrument, so vast
that its construction was possible only in the weightless conditions
of space, was taking form between the two ships. A slightly smaller
edition of the great telescope which had been set up so long ago in the
doomed Unthan system to search space for a second home for their race,
it would be capable, when the silvered plastic film of its reflector had
been stretched into place, of resolving individual waves on the oceans of
the third planet. With this bigger telescope they would obtain detailed
charts of the land and sea areas, and with the aid of information sent
back from the high-acceleration probes already shooting ahead of them
they would choose their landing areas.
Meanwhile the position of every unit of the great fleet would have to be
checked and, if necessary, corrected. The control and guidance system that
would allow them to apply thrust simultaneously to each and every ship had
to be tested, as did the master controls for the general warming-up prior
to landing. The landing itself would be the responsibility of the original
crew, but they would not be warmed until everything was ready for them.
The feelings of Captain Heglenni and her trainee crew towards the
deep-sleeping bodies of Captain Gunt, Astrogator Gerrol, and the others
were somewhat mixed. They felt a respect close to religious awe for
these legendary beings who had actually lived and gone through their
training on Untha itself, but there was also a feeling that came very
close to being one of dislike.
Heglenni felt ashamed of this feeling. Yet, at the same time she could
not help remembering that Captain Gunt had cooled himself, leaving the
original Deslann and Hellahar with a terrible problem to solve. When she
would return the command of the flagship and the fleet to Captain Gunt,
the solution to that terrible problem, she was determined, should be as
complete as possible in every detail. The answer had cost so much in time
and suffering and often violent death that she felt it only right that
Gunt should be made to feel a little bit ashamed.
From the moment when his brain had thawed sufficiently to allow the
electrochemical processes of thought to proceed normally, the newly warmed
Captain Gunt had been bombarded by reports. To begin with there had been
the data in the captain's log, the more detailed information relayed via
Gerrol regarding Deslann's proposed solution, and the other captain's
final personal message to him, and then had come the highly compressed
history in the form of a report by the female Captain Heglenni, whose
mere presence was proof that Deslann's solution had worked, had just
reached its shattering conclusion.
There was a quality of madness about the whole situation, Gunt thought
wildly: the familiar rendered frightening by a touch of the strange,
the good wrecked by the bad, and joy flowing too closely to despair. The
psychologists had spoken warningly about vacillation of feelings like
this!
Gerrol insisted that the few errors committed on the ship had been
sociological rather than technical -- for the computer room around them
blazed with ready signals and the navigation and course corrections of
the flagship and fleet had been performed with great efficiency, although
the atmosphere of the room, whose water had been recycled for nearly
sixteen generations, had become unpleasant to the point of nausea. The
few sociological, and no doubt unavoidable, errors had begun with the
catastrophic rule of Helltag the Mad and the split that left half the
flagship's crew no choice but to transfer to the nearby food ship. The
severity of the punishments given out to the heretics who had defied
the first Deslann's edict against warming other cold-sleeping Unthans,
and the war between Deslann Five and Hellseggorn of the food ship, which
had given the flagship a desperately needed reserve of non-sterile males,
were further errors. The generations, too, of increasingly psychotic and
physically malformed crew people, the sickness and suffering and often
needless deaths were all a product of these errors, as was this small,
lean, angry female captain.
She was waiting for him to speak.
"We have arrived safely at the target system," Gunt said stupidly.
"It should be a time of great joy. Are you sure that . . . that -- "
He broke off, thinking that since Heglenni had first begun her report
he had been trying desperately to see some tiny resemblance to Deslann
and Hellahar in this female, but in vain. If anything she reminded him
of some of the early predators who had been hunted and starved out of
existence when civilization had been spreading through the seas of Untha.
They also had been thin, stunted, diseased, and savage.
"The telescope will fall ahead of us once thrust is applied," said Heglenni
impatiently. "If you distrust my data there is still time to view the planet
directly instead of studying my photographs."
"I trust your data," said Gunt dully. "The news has come as a shock to me.
I was thinking aloud and perhaps hoping for a miracle."
The other captain's expression softened briefly, and for a moment Gunt
thought he saw a little of Healer Hellahar's compassion and Deslann's
dedication show through, then she went on, "I understand your feelings
of shock and disappointment, since I share them myself, sir. The target
system has been reached safely and the problem you set Captain Deslann
has been solved. But the target world is inhabited more so than it
was centuries ago when our original pictures were taken, when there
was no evidence of widespread mechanization or road systems. It has
become densely populated by an intelligent, gas-breathing form of
life sufficiently advanced to cross interplanetary space. There are
bases on the target planet's moon and on the dehydrated fourth planet,
also strong indications of bases on the moons of the inner gas giant,
planet Five. I myself can conceive of no solution to this problem nor
can any of my crew, so I'm passing responsibility back to you, sir."
Neither captain spoke for a long time after that. Then, slowly Captain
Gunt performed the gesture of respect between equals and said formally,
"I hereby relieve you of the command of this ship."
XX
The target world continued to circle her parent sun, a planet of great
beauty and serenity whose peace was now actual as well as apparent.
The closest and most detailed examination showed no evidence of war,
the few smoke palls on the dayside being the by-product of industry,
while on the nightside the cities blazed only with street lights and
advertising. There was still a great deal of suffering and death,
but this was in distressed areas like India and China where there was,
as there always had been, a shortage of food. And in a tiny bay on the
southwest coast of Spain, cut off from land and sea alike by high cliffs
and reefs which were thought to be. impassable, in two hundred feet of
water there lay a distressed area nobody knew about.
Commander James Eichlan Wallis of Gulf Trader (he had been elected commander
as well as ship's doctor because of his seniority and a recent tendency,
shared by the very first commander and all who had followed him to worry
much more than was normal about the future) was lecturing on the evils
of marriage.
"There was a time in the not too distant past," he was saying in the
bitter, sarcastic tones which had become second nature to him these
days, "when marriage was considered a necessary evil. And a time before
that, the Game tells us, when it was not considered evil at all but a
necessity for a stable and happy existence. That happy state of affairs
no longer obtains. Now if a man
likes
a girl, or vice versa, there is
danger. For him to make love to her is nothing short of criminal insanity,
the ultimate in selfishness and deliberate murder!"
"Let's change the subject, sir," said Heather May Dickson, in a voice both
respectful and impatient. Her twin sister's voice was merely impatient as
she said, "You've told us about childbirth before, Doctor, many times -- "
"And I'll tell you again!" Wallis snapped. He went on, "We lack medical
facilities, food, clothing, and proper living conditions for both mother
and child. The cold and damp has worsened steadily over the past few
years, with the result that all of you young people have heart conditions
and lung conditions which would be considered grave in a normal, well-fed,
and clothed person who was not being subjected to any physical strain. You
are not well fed. You are shockingly deficient in certain vitamins and
your resistance to disease or infection is practically nonexistent --
and this is in relation to conditions within the ship only ten years ago,
not the physical norm which my medical knowledge describes! Neither of
you girls could survive a pregnancy, and for a baby to survive in the
present living conditions would be likewise impossible. This is fact,
not supposition. There are only seven of us left and we can't afford to
lose anyone else -- "
"If we don't marry we won't gain anyone, either," someone said sotto voce.
It sounded like Henry Joe-Jim Dickson. The four young people laughed,
but not the seniors.
The doctor said furiously, "I have in mind a modification to the Game.
The idea is that instead of recalling and re-enacting scenes from
Hornblower or landings on alien planets, we delve into something a little
closer to home: the memories of your fathers and myself, for instance,
of the period immediately preceding and following your births.
"Myself, I can remember this material quite vividly," the doctor went on
harshly, "even without the mental discipline of the Game. I could recall
the complete medical situation as well as describe the incidental sights
and, uh, sounds. Your fathers' memories will also be clear in this period,
since they became widowed within a few minutes of your being born. . . ."