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.