The compleat collected s.., p.261
The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 261
At the moment, however, there was nothing wild or heretical about the things he was saying. The doctor turned from the porthole to listen.
"... So the food can't last forever even if we agree to drastically reduce the future population," Arthur was saying. "Everybody agrees to this measure, particularly when they have just become parents for the first time and realize what a dangerous and painful thing childbirth is in this place. But usually it isn't until the second time that they do anything about it. In any case the population is going down due to worsening living conditions. It hasn't been as low as twelve since—"
"We could grow more food," said his sister, Irene MacDougall Wallis.
"That would help with the clothing problem, too," said her cousin, Bing Churchill Dickswon. "Plant fiber material can't be made into an overall, it comes apart too easily and it can't be washed at all. But it's warm and if we had more growing plants—"
"I agree," said Randolph Brutus Dickson, the fourth member of the group. "Even though shredded beanstalks itch like blazes, I prefer them to going around raw like this. I haven't felt warm since I was a baby."
The fifth member of the party laughed. She was Elizabeth Graves Wallis and she laughed at everything. When she wasn't laughing she smiled silently and played with her fingers, and she was without doubt the happiest person in the ship.
"Extending the garden won't work," Arthur resumed patiently, "because we haven't the necessary wiring or light bulbs. At the rate we're blowing them they won't outlast the food supply, and increasing the number of lighting points will use them up that much quicker. No bulbs means no light, no beans, and no air. As I see it there is no solution to the problem within the ship, which means that we must work toward rescue."
At that point the doctor began to feel a little bit disappointed in ASW. Methods of attracting the attention of the people on the surface were always being tried, although much less frequently of late, from simple banging on the hull in Morse to running lights into Richard's Rooms and flashing them through the portholes at night. But the attempts had seemed only to make everyone unhappy for months afterwards, and now they were actively discouraged. Thinking about rescue was like thinking about girls, a phase of youth.
"My idea was to use the Rooms here," Arthur went on, "to get one of us to the surface. The door to the weather deck is rusted solid and the same goes for the portholes, but I was thinking of smashing the glass and squeezing through, or being pushed through by an adult, and swimming to the surface. To get through the port it would have to be a seven- or eight-year-old. Or ten, maybe, if he was thin enough."
"He would have to be well briefed on what to say to the people up there," ASW went on, "and would carry something—a message and the lieutenant commander's identity card, perhaps—so that if he didn't make it to the shore alive, or his verbal report was not believed at least, they would still know we were here ..."
"J-just a minute!" the doctor broke in aghast. "You can't do that! The port would be a tight squeeze even for a skinny eight-year-old, and there would be jagged edges of glass around the rim. You couldn't be sure of breaking all of them away with the water pouring in. The kid would be cut to ribbons on the way out!"
"The adult," said Arthur seriously, "would be a volunteer who knew that he was going to die, so he would not panic. He would be tied in position so that the inrush of water would not sweep him away from the port, and while the boy kept his head in the air as long as possible and hyperventilated, the adult would knock all of the loose glass from the rim of the port. When the water rose above the top edge of the port the air trapped in the upper part of the room would slow the influx of water and allow plenty of time for the boy to be assisted through the port—"
"No!"
This time it was Irene who objected, and she sounded personally afraid rather than shocked at the idea as she went on, "It would mean losing the Rooms and making the ship blind! I don't think I could stand that. Our parents might—they don't like coming here because they can see out and that makes them uncomfortable. But I want to know that there is somewhere else besides the ship, something else besides rusting metal walls and damp bedding and this everlasting cold and stench.
"I'd like to live up here," she added vehemently, "and look out at the light all the time. No matter what it is that makes it."
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 willfully 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 intercostals 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 a 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 got at outside."
"Doesn't it bother you," said the doctor, trying another rack, "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 be banging on the plating with his fists. Shortly afterwards the noises stopped.
Chapter Eighteen
SOMEBODY had committed the unforgiveable crime of moving a packing case without previously notifying the change of position. The case could very well have been moved accidently 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 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 the 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 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 our 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 stage of construction. But you have no control of your main drive, neither have you an means of seeing outside of 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 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.
"... Can you hear me, sir?" the female was saying worriedly. "They know something is going on. I repeat, they are sure that it is an attack but are not yet certain of the exact locality. Flagship to Captain Deslann. The food ship has now broken contact, but they know something is going on."
