The Watch Below (22 page)

"Back to Four!" called the doctor. "Forget about Two and Three.
But make sure the door is tight. Scrape off the rust, hammer it loose,
do what you can. And
hurry
!"
Two and Three were saddle tanks and if one should remain airtight while
the other did not, there would be a strain set up in the badly weakened
fabric of the ship, a strain which might very well crack open the entire
system of tanks. Allowing both tanks to flood would equalize the strain
on the forward wall of Four. It would also, Wallis reminded himself,
double it!
Like the other watertight doors between the tanks, this one had been
dogged open to facilitate the free circulation of air, and like the
others it was practically rusted solid in that position. They had to
hammer at the door and its surrounding with scrap metal in an effort
to dislodge the gritty incrustation that could be felt (but could not
be seen) covering everything, then to scrape frantically with bits of
metal and wood and even their fingers to free hinges and coaming of the
clogging rust. They used files that were themselves little more than bars
of rust, and the damage they inflicted on each other amid the darkness and
confusion was severe although not, it seemed, immediately disabling.
Yet, all the time the water rose steadily, spraying into Four through the
supposedly watertight door from Two. When they closed the door they were
working on to check the fit, water built up so quickly behind it that the
efforts of all of them were needed to push it open again. Then came the
time when they could not force it open. Water streamed from its edges
in a steadily increasing volume and ran aft along the deck. They were
forced to retreat again.
The door into Seven was in better condition, since it was closed
frequently to contain the heat generated by the lighting in the garden
there. Number Seven held, even though it was not perfectly tight either.
Nevertheless, it allowed them time to stop and think. It gave them a
chance to take stock, to realize how much was lost to them, and to
adjust to their new, harsher and, it was plainly obvious, all too
impermanent world.
The other two seniors were dead. The elder Dickson had been trapped
in Number One and Wallis's brother had died during the confusion in
Four. It was difficult to say what exactly had happened by touch alone,
but it seemed that his brother had tripped in the darkness -- a lot of
gear had changed its position, moved both by the water and by the people
working on the doors -- and hit his head with sufficient force for him
to lose consciousness, and he had drowned quietly in a few inches of
water. They could have moved the body aft, but the doctor had asked that
it be left where it was. The entrance to Richard's Hole was under water,
as was the generator, the garden, and most of the bedding. All the tanks
forward of Seven were flooded or inaccessible. Within the space of a
few hours their world had shrunk by half.
Whereas before there had been miserable cold and dampness, there was now
the added misery of flooding. The water was more than a foot deep around
the connecting doors and, because of the attitude of the ship, it was almost
waist-deep in the sternmost tank, Number Twelve. With the generator gone
and the garden destroyed by sea water there was no possibility of producing
light or heat, or of recycling air or distilling drinking water. With half
their world had gone half their air supply. There were odd scraps of wood
and metal, even a few electric light bulbs, and enough food. They would not
starve. The food supply, while meager, would far outlast the water and air.
Full circle, thought Wallis.
Five survivors in a sunken ship, Wallis thought sadly. Two young couples
and an aging, bad-tempered doctor facing death because there wasn't enough
air or drinking water. But this time there was no possibility of continued
survival, for their resources were gone and there was no scope in which
to exercise their ingenuity, nothing with which they could build a world
for themselves, and no means of extending their lives by more than a few
weeks. This was, finally, the end of the world. They should all try to
accept that fact, stop struggling, and try to adopt a more philosophical
attitude to their approaching end.
"Is anyone badly hurt?" Wallis asked gently.
There were numerous cuts and bruises, but nothing serious. He advised
them to bathe the wounds in a saline solution -- there was plenty of it
about -- to remove dirt or rust, and warned them not to cover the areas
until a scab had formed, because of the danger of septicemia from the
hair coverings. He also suggested that they move to Richard's Rooms with
as much bedding as could be salvaged, that being the only relatively dry
spot in the ship. They could wave the damp bedding around their heads
to dry it off, and the exercise would help keep them warm. . . .
That night they did not play the Game. Instead they huddled together for
warmth, wriggling to get closer together and farther away from the cold,
damp bedding and even colder deck, which sucked the heat remorselessly
from them, and cursed because they could do neither. It was the first
time the Game had not been played, the first night that their phenomenal
minds and tremendous memories had not been able to lift them out of the
discomfort of the here-and-now and into the bright, happy worlds of music
and fiction and history, even of ship history. It was the first time
that the memories of recent events had raised such a terrible barrier,
a barrier cutting off all retreat into the past, the future, or even the
might-have-been. It was perhaps the first time that they all realized
that there was no hope, that there never had been any hope.
The commander lay shivering and cursing and listening to the sounds of
dripping water and the creaking of their rusty, disintegrating world for
a very long thne; then he said, "You know, with five of us occupying this
small cabin there is bound to be a lot of breath condensation. We can
collect it and eke out the drinking water. It might even be possible
to salvage enough for a small generator -- a hand model, of course,
because of the small space available, and, if nothing else, building it
will occupy our minds. We'll have to make a determined effort to attract
attention again, by banging on the hull in relays. This will help warm
us up as well as . . . as . . ."
He trailed off into silence and the silence remained unbroken.
You stupid, cowardly fool! he raged silently at himself.
Don't you know
when to give up!
On the surface, in the War Room of a building many times older than the
sunken tanker, other men were discussing the question of survival.
"Is it agreed that we use anti-missiles, proximity-fused, with chemical
warheads?" said the officer at one side of the table. "Our anti-missiles
were intended for use against ground-launched ICBMs, and will therefore
not be effective until the enemy has penetrated to within one hundred
miles of the surface. Do we also agree that to use nuclear warheads in
these circumstances would hurt us more than the enemy, assuming that the
enemy ships are in fact susceptible to damage and are not equipped with,
uh, super weapons of offense or defense?"
There was no head to the table. The officers seated around it were the top
military men of their respective governments and bore equal rank despite
the fact that some of their uniforms were heavy with ribbons and gold braid
while others were almost ostentatiously simple and unadorned. It was one of
the latter who spoke next, using his interpreter.
"I do not understand their strategy," he said. "To send in a small advance
force to test our defenses is good. To wait nearly a year, which is the time
our observatories tell us will be required for the remainder of their fleet
to reach earth, before committing the main force is bad tactics. It gives us
too much time to prepare."
"Not enough time, by far," said another. "With luck we will be able to
deal with the first wave using all of our present stock of anti-missiles,
but a year is not enough to prepare for the main invasion!"
"The whole idea of an invasion from space is tactically unsound,"
a quieter voice broke in. "Perhaps this is an assumption we were too
quick to make. The aliens have begun to send what appear to be signals,
a continuous audio-frequency note, containing patterned interruptions,
like Morse in reverse. If we assume instead that . . ."
His voice was drowned suddenly in a flood of objections, which condensed
after a few minutes into the quiet, sardonic voice and objections of one man.
"There is no peaceful solution to this problem, General," he said.
"At their present rate of deceleration, the vanguard of the enemy fleet
is just fifty-six hours away. If they were broadcasting messages of peace
and good will in perfect English with an accent of one of your better
public schools, we could act no differently: it would be the same as
saying that Overlord had been mounted so that the men could picnic
on the Normandy beaches. Their presence and behavior here is plainly,
unmistakably hostile."
"Our launching sites aren't positioned for an attack from space," said
another voice worriedly. "But it would be good tactics for them to orbit
a few times to get a closer look at their objectives, and perhaps do a
little softening-up, in which case all our sites would get a crack at them
as they went over. The thing bothering me is if they try to soften us up
with H-bombs -- "
"Not likely, I would say," another voice broke in. "The size of the fleet
alone would make it seem certain that they intend landing and that they
should not want to dirty up their bridgehead with fallout. Of course,
we may have been under surveillance without knowing it for a long time.
They might know enough about our physical make-up to use nerve gases
or bacteria -- "
"No matter what they send, we'll have to soak it up," the first officer
broke in. "If they come straight in so that the majority of our launchers
cannot be brought to bear, we'll have to hit them with jets and ground
artillery. If they become established we may be forced to use nuclear
weapons, which would be very bad if the area were densely populated. But
if they make the mistake of going into orbit, especially if it is a low,
bombing orbit -- "
". . . We'll clobber them," someone finished for him.
The vanguard of the Unthan fleet did not go into orbit. It did not have
the fuel reserves to do so. In the flagship's forward screens the surface
features of the target world -- layers of water vapor hanging in the gas
envelope, details of the drab, useless land masses and the tremendous
blue oceans -- grew steadily larger and crawled over the edges of the
picture. The casualties they suffered were reflected in the computer
room, where lights went out quietly and guidance systems died at the
other end and from where it was difficult to realize the true extent of
the devastation and death taking place all around them. Looking out of
the direct vision panels it was hard for Gunt to realize that anything
at all was happening or that there were beings down there doing their
best to kill him . . . until the detectors showed a missile climbing
towards them, closing fast.
It was over so quickly that by the time his lagging brain realized that
he was about to die they had been reprieved and he was free to work out
what had actually happened.
Obviously the missile's target-seeker had equated size with importance and
turned it at the penultimate instant onto the larger food ship, which had
been keeping close station on them for so many generations. The missile
must have penetrated the hull before exploding, because the ship seemed to
jerk apart silently as the force of the explosion was transmitted through
the water to every single corner of its structure. It opened out slowly,
hurling great masses of metal, gobbets of coldly steaming water, and the
twitching bodies of the food animals in all directions. Gunt cringed
as several times debris narrowly missed the flagship, but unknown to
him, the expanding sphere of wreckage was confusing the ground radar,
making it impossible to detect a whole ship among the falling pieces,
so it saved his ship.
The flagship dived through the cloud layer into heavy precipitation and
strong winds and near darkness, to hang poised for an instant above the
storm-tossed sea before sliding quietly below the surface.
Now they would have to spend precious time hunting for shelter and hope
that their movements and eventual hiding place did not register on
the detecting instruments of the enemy. Gunt intended to camouflage
the ship, if he had time, and arrange a system of communications, but
before that happened his colonists would form into their preselected
survival groups and scatter themselves up and down this rocky, beautiful
subcoastline. They would not scatter too far because the captain wanted
to know what to expect in the way of weapons and general nastiness from
the enemy so that he, or the person who survived him, could tell the
later arrivals what to expect. They were little more than experimental
animals, Gunt thought sickly, being tested to destruction.
Captain Heglenni and her females had been given a much more positive
assignment, that of obtaining specimens of the enemy life-form together
with whatever artifacts and mechanisms became available for study. It
was accepted that Heglenni would have to kill the specimens and take
the mechanisms by force, and that the war was only just beginning, but
Captain Gunt did not allow himself to think about that too much. The
future was too horrible for any sane person to dwell in it mentally for
any longer than was necessary.
His ship was down, safely.
XXII
More than eighty per cent of the Unthan vanguard escaped the anti-missiles
and reached the ocean safely. The earth defenses, with no previous experience
of invasion from space, had deployed as best they could against expected
landings in force in desert or thinly populated areas. They were thrown badly
off balance by the fact that the enemy did not make a single preliminary
orbit, that instead of a concentration of force they came down in single
units scattered all over the surface of the globe, and that the landings
did not take place on land but in the sea around the world's coastlines.
Except for one ship, that was.