The Watch Below (21 page)

He had meant to shock some sense into them and the silence that followed
his threat showed he might have succeeded. The other two seniors were not
a problem: they were trying hard to forget the manner in which their
respective wives had died. On the other hand, the twin girls and the two
young men, sixteen and nineteen years old, had not been there at the time
so far as memory was concerned, so they were a problem. Warnings continually
repeated tended to lose their meaning; they became, instead, tiresome
rather than frightening. So the doctor was threatening in order to
bring home to everyone the full, terrible meaning behind his warnings,
and was using the Game to do it.
It was only a threat, of course. The thought of his ever having to put
it into effect was enough to make Doctor Wallis himself start to shake.
The Game was not only sacred, it was as much a part of life in the ship
as eating and breathing. During the Game life became tolerable, and even
exciting and happy. It allowed them to forget the short period of
nightmare each day when they walked barefoot over cold metal harsh
with rust, shivering in the scraps of hair and plant fiber they called
clothing.
They could forget the generator, now more a means of keeping warm than a
device for supplying light, and the garden which, with insufficient light
and no heat at all, barely kept itself alive. It allowed them to forget
the food, still inadequate despite their having overcome theit repugnance
at eating the fish caught in Richard's Hole, and the damp, frigid air
which tied up their muscles and joints with rheumatism and fibrositis and
made their heads pound with the pain of inflamed sinuses and neuralgia
and toothache. The Game allowed them to forget their shivering, wasted,
and diseased bodies in the hard and sustained exercise of their minds --
minds which, although they had no way of knowing it, were in many respects
the keenest and most highly developed on the whole planet. That their
wonderful Game should be used to remember all the things they were trying
so desperately to forget was the ultimate sacrilege, an idea so perverted
and horrifying that it should have been unthinkable.
But the doctor had thought of it because something drastic in the way
of warnings was needed to keep the young people from mating. On the
whole, life in Gulf Trader was bearable, and providing there were no
more deaths in childbirth or similar disasters, morale would remain
good. They were having an unusually cold and, judging by the agitated
state of the surface above them, very stormy winter. Conditions were
bound to improve soon. They could hardly get any worse.
Well above the plane of the ecliptic and on the point of passing within
the orbit of the system's inner gas giant, the leading elements of the
Unthan fleet were decelerating and converging on the target world. Far
behind them on the outermost fringe of the system, from where the sun
appeared only as an unusually bright star, the main body of the fleet
also decelerated and slowly converged. In the flagship most of the major
decisions had already been taken, but there was discussion, argument,
and recrimination regarding them.
"I agree that it is unfortunate they have attained such a high degree
of civilization," Gunt was saying angrily. "If they had been backward we
could simply have landed in their oceans and taken our time over making
contact. With luck there might have been peaceful coexistence between
us. As it is, what we are doing is bound to appear as an act of war,
a large-scale invasion, and they are bound to react to it as such. Even
if we had the fuel reserves to put the fleet into orbit while we tried to
communicate with them, I doubt very much whether we could convince them
of our peaceful intentions in the presence of such a multitude of ships!"
"It
is
their planet, sir," said Gerrol.
"We don't want all of it," one of the engineers joined in. "Just the oceans,
and they don't use them for anything but floating boats on."
"This point has been raised before," Gunt resumed sharply, "by everyone
including myself! The answer is ethically unsatisfactory, but it is this.
If we had been the kind of race which accepted fate quietly and
philosophically, we would have stayed on Untha while our seas boiled
away and us with them. We aren't and we didn't. This is a fight for
the survival of our race, and as senior captain of the fleet my duty
is clear. It is unfortunate that we are forced into fighting other
intelligent beings, potentially friendly beings perhaps, and that the
struggle to survive in a strange environment has become a war with no
foreseeable end. But we must fight and we must put every effort into
fighting effectively; otherwise we might just as well have stayed at
home -- "
"I still think we should try to communicate, sir," another voice broke in.
Inevitably it belonged to the senior communications officer, Dasdahar.
"So do I," said the captain. "But how much success have you had up to now?"
Dasdahar hesitated, then said, "These beings are gas-breathers living on
the dry surface of their planet. This being so, they could be expected to
discover the principles of radio communication at a much earlier stage of
their technological history than water-breathers like ourselves, who knew
nothing, about ionization layers until we were practically on the brink of
space travel. The point I'm trying to make is that there are bound to be
fundamental differences in approach. Add to that the fact that their aural
and vocal senses are designed for use in a gaseous medium while we hear
and speak through water and you will understand some of the difficulties.
"At the moment we are working on a device to convert sound waves produced
in water into frequencies which should, we hope, be audible in the more
tenuous gaseous medium," the officer went on. "And vice versa, of course.
The tests are promising, and once we gain some idea of the frequencies
used by these beings, we should be able to hear them and they us. We won't
be able to understand what they're
saying
, of course, but with luck
maybe . . . some kind of . . . simple message . . ."
Dasdahar floundered into silence, and Gunt said, "Something more definite
than an untried sound converter and a lot of wishful thinking is required
if we are to change our plans, plans which have general, if reluctant,
agreement. . . . And now I want to go into the landing drill in more
detail. . . ."
The plan called for no change in procedure so far as the expendables
were concerned. Domestic and food animals making up the vanguard would
be warmed automatically just prior to arrival and released from their
ships as soon as the vessels had water around them, after which they
would have to fend for themselves. They would at the very least create
a diversion and some might even survive. The timers throughout the
fleet would be set to warm up the cold-sleeping Unthans to have the
situation explained to them by Gunt and his crew on the flagship and
by various sub-fleet commanders via radio on the other ships. Ideally
the explanations should be given soon enough before arrival for the
situation to be grasped but not so early that a general panic could
develop. There were no alternatives except fight or die, and if they
were going to survive as a race they would have to fight hard.
"I don't want to hear any more talk about communicating with these beings,"
Gunt went on harshly. "We must be realistic. They are alien people,
so much so that they may have nothing in common with us. Even if we did
by some chance share a common outlook or philosophy or even a dislike
for something, there will be no time to find out about it. To them our
arrival is an act of war and in the interests of survival we must proceed
as if it
is
war!
"The landing areas have been chosen with concealment and survival in
mind," the captain went on, "such as near outcroppings of rock which
penetrate the surface and similar obstacles to sea-surface navigation,
underwater caves and geological features where we can establish concealed
bases. The data from the probes and the telescopic observations will
enable the fleet to land in optimum surroundings. The water is breathable
so that no cumbersome protective suits will be needed. . . ."
Immediately as a ship landed, its newly warmed cargo would scatter,
carrying as much portable equipment as possible. Later, if the ship were
not destroyed in some fashion by the enemy, they might risk returning
for heavier and more complex equipment, but only if it were safe to do
so. The main idea was to hide and survive until their strange new world
no longer seemed so strange. Very likely a great number of them would
be hunted down and killed, but not everyone. Some of them would survive
and go on the offensive. In time there might even be peace.
Nevertheless, at the present time the most important point to remember
was that the new world was almost as strange to the enemy as it was
to themselves. The planet belonged to these gas-breathers and they floated
thousands of surface vessels on its oceans, and there were many indications
that they were not afraid of water, but as a race they did not live and
breathe in water, they did not have the instincts or the evolutionary
background of the Unthans. It was the captain's belief that many more
of his people would survive than would be killed.
Which brought him to the subject of weapons.
". . . The weapon most likely to be used against us," Gunt continued,
"will be a limited mass-destruction affair using a chemical charge
exploded at depth and relying on compression effects to produce casualties.
We may expect a great many of these bombs to reach us, singly and in
patterns calculated to inflict maximum damage. Our defense against this
weapon will be our high degree of mobility, early decentralization, and
small personnel domes anchored to the sea bed using layers of plastic,
gas, and gas-filled sponge to absorb the shock waves. At the present time
I do not see them exploding nuclear weapons in the sea, as our observations
regarding their population and the numbers of small surface vessels indicate
that the sea might be a small but important part of their food supply.
They will not want to risk poisoning it until their position appears
desperate.
"Our own weapons will be crude and ineffectual to begin with," the captain
went on. "Spring-loaded harpoons, a few adhesive mines, and so on. If the
gas-breathers underestimate us, so much the better. Eventually some of us
will establish ourselves, reclaim heavy equipment from our abandoned ships,
begin mining the sea bed. Quietly we will develop more sophisticated
weapons, process radioactives, perfect our technology. We will stockpile
dirigible torpedoes carrying nuclear warheads capable of traversing the
gas envelope and striking any point on the planetary surface.
"The pollution of the planet's gas envelope and the death of surface
food supplies will have very little effect on sea dwellers," Gunt went
on grimly, "and provided we retain the initiative, retaliation from the
gas-breathers should be minimal."
There was a strange lack of motion in the bodies around him, and he was
aware that the silence was not simply due to attention for a superior
officer. Astrogator Gerrol, the engineers, and the rest of his contemporary
crew members were floating still and silent like so many cooled food animals,
all staring at him with exactly the same expression. Even the female
Heglenni, who, because of her lack of sensitivity and background, might
have been expected to support him, wore the same expression.
Gunt did not try to meet their eyes. Angrily, he said, "It's them, or us.
I'm sorry, it is a question of survival!"
XXI
Conditions, Doctor Wallis had been fond of telling his people, could not
possibly get worse. . . .
They were awakened one night in late winter, that is, those who were lucky
enough to be asleep, by a high-pitched creaking noise and the sound of
running water. There had never been sounds like this in living memory
or in the Game-recalled history of the ship, so they struggled out of
their sleeping hair and ran for'rard, following the direction of the
noises. They ran fast and sure-footed despite the darkness, because they
knew every inch of the way, the height and placing of every watertight
door, and the exact position of the contents of each and every tank. It
was a matter of memory plus the fact that there had been no changes in
the ship for a very long time. Now, however, there was change.
In Number Four they ran into water, a slow, icy trickle moving aft along
the deck and collecting, because of the stern-downward attitude of the
ship, at the watertight door between Four and Five. At the entrance to
Three, the water was dammed up level with the coaming and they splashed
through it knee-deep. It was the same beyond the entrance to One, except
that here the water poured over the edge of the coaming in a steady flood,
and from the forward wall of the tank there came sounds as of a gentle
waterfall overlaid by the erratic creaking and groaning of metal under
strain. The deck beneath their feet seemed to twitch and shiver.
"Everybody out!" shouted the doctor. "There's nothing here worth salvaging.
Out!"
Wallis stationed himself at the watertight door, counting the bodies
as they went past him. He had no idea who they were exactly since they
were merely centers of heavy breathing and splashing in the darkness,
but five of them went through before the forward wall gave. There was
a sharp, metallic screech, a gargantuan bubbling and then by a sudden
rush of water he was swept through the door gasping and trying not to
cry out with the pain of what the rusty edge of the door had done to the
skin of his hip and leg. Then, abruptly, the flood was gone as suddenly
as it had come. Wallis picked himself up and moved to examine the door.
Despite the stiff, rust-clogged hinges, the weight of water pouring into
Number One had slammed the door shut. But the door, again because of rust,
was no longer completely watertight. The doctor's exploring fingers detected
a thin, high-pressure jet of water coming from the edge of the door all the
way round. The plating between the flooded One and Two was beginning to
creak alarmingly under the mounting pressure of water, and above them the
escaping air thumped and gurgled thunderously towards the weather deck and
the surface. Everywhere there was the pattering and splashing of water.