Non-Stop

I

Only the occasional stale glow of a pilot light illuminated the coiled miles of corridor. At one end of the ship, the ponics were begining to collapse on to themselves in the death each dark sleep-wake inevitably brought; at the other end of the ship, Master Scoyt still drove his men in a torch-light search for the Giant. Scoyt’s party, working along the lower levels of the Drive Floors, had drained the twenties decks of Forwards almost clear of life.

As the dark came down, it caught Henry Marapper, the priest, going from Councillor Tregonnin’s room to his own without a torch. Marapper had been carefully ingratiating himself into the librarian’s favour, against the time when the Council of Five should be reconstituted as the Council of Six — Marapper, of course, visualizing himself as the sixth Councillor. He walked now through the dimness warily, half afraid a Giant might pop up in front of him.

Which was almost exactly what did happen.

A door ahead of him was flung open, a wash of illumination pouring into the corridor. Startled, Marapper shrank back. The light eerily flapped and churned, transforming shadows into frightened bats as the bearer of the torch hustled about his nocturnal business in the room. Next moment, two great figures emerged, bearing between them a smaller figure who slumped as if ill. Undoubtedly, these were Giants: they were over six feet high.

The light, of exceptional brilliance, was worn as a fitting on one Giant’s head; it sent the uneasy shadows scattering again as its wearer bent and half-carried the small figure. They went only half a dozen paces down the corridor before stopping in the middle of it, kneeling there with their faces away from Marapper. And now the light fell upon the face of the smaller man. It was Fermour!

With a word to the Giants, Fermour, leaning forward, put his knuckles to the deck in a curious gesture. His hand fingertips upward, was for a moment caught alone in the cone of torchlight; then a section of deck, responding to his pressure, rose and was seized by the Giants, seized and lifted to reveal a large manhole. The Giants helped Fermour down into it, climbed down themselves, and closed the hatch over their heads. The glow from a square pilot light on the wall was again the only illumination in a deserted corridor.

Then Marapper found his tongue.

‘Help!’ he bellowed. ‘Help! They’re after me!’

He pounded on the nearest doors, flinging them open when no reply came. These were workers’ apartments, mainly deserted by their owners, who were away following Scoyt and the Survival Team. In one room, Marapper discovered a mother suckling her babe by a dim light. She and the baby began to howl with fear.

The rumpus soon brought running feet and flashing torches. Marapper was surrounded by people and reduced to a state of coherence. These were mainly men who had been on the grand Giant-hunt, men with their blood roused by the unaccustomed excitement; they let out wilder cries than Marapper to hear that Giants had been here, right in their midst. The crowd swelled, the noise increased. Marapper found himself crushed against the wall, repeating his tale endlessly to a succession of officers, until an icy man called Pagwam, Co-Captain of the Survival Team, pushed his way through the group.

Pagwam rapidly cleared a space round Marapper.

‘Show me this hole you say the Giants disappeared down,’ he ordered. ‘Point to it.’

‘This would have terrified a less brave man than I,’ Marapper said, still shaking. He pointed: a rectangular line in the deck outlined the Giants’ exit. It was a hair-fine crack, hardly noticeable. Inside the rectangle at one end was a curious octagonal indentation, not half an inch across; apart from that, there was nothing to distinguish the trap-door from the rest of the deck.

At Pagwam’s orders, two men tried to lever open the trapdoor, but the crack was so fine they could do no more than poke their fingernails down it.

‘It won’t come up, sir,’ one of the men said.

‘Thank hem for that!’ Marapper exclaimed, visualizing a stream of Giants emerging upon them.

By this time, somebody had fetched Scoyt. The Master’s face was harder set than ever; his long fingers restlessly caressed the runners of his cheeks as he listened to Pagwam and Marapper. Though he looked tired, when he spoke he revealed that his brain was the widest awake of those present.

‘You see what this means,’ he said. ‘These traps are set in the floor about a hundred paces apart throughout the ship; we’ve never recognized them as such because we could never open them, but the Giants can open them easily enough. We no longer need doubt, whatever we once thought to the contrary, that the Giants still exist. For reasons of their own, they have laid low for a long while: now they’re coming back — and for what other purpose than to take over the ship again?’

‘But this trap –’ Marapper said.

‘This trap,’ Scoyt interrupted, ‘is the key to the whole matter. Do you remember when your friend Complain was captured by Giants he said he was spirited into a hole and travelled in a low, confined space that sounded like no part of the ship we knew? Obviously, it was a space between decks, and he was taken down a trap just like this one. All traps must inter-communicate — and if the Giants can open one, they can open the lot!’

An uneasy babble of comment rose from the crowd in the corridor. Their eyes were bright, their torches dim; they seemed to press more closely together, as if for comfort. Marapper cleared his throat, inserting the tip of his little finger helplessly into his ear, as if that were the only thing in the world he could get clear.

‘This means — jezers nose, this means our world is entirely surrounded by a sort of thin world where the Giants can get and we can’t,’ he said. ‘Is that so?’

Scoyt nodded curtly.

‘Not a nice thought, Priest, eh?’ he said.

When Pagwam touched his arm, Scoyt turned impatiently to find that three of the Council of Five, Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin, had arrived behind him. They looked both unhappy and annoyed.

‘Please say no more, Master Scoyt,’ Billyoe said. ‘We’ve heard most of this, and it hardly sounds the sort of thing which should be discussed in public. You’d better bring this — er, this priest along with you to the council room; we’ll talk there.’

Scoyt hardly hesitated.

‘On the contrary, Councillor Billyoe,’ he said distinctly. ‘This matter affects every man jack on board. Everyone must know about it as quickly as possible. I’m afraid we are being swept to a time of crisis.’

Although he was contradicting the Council, Scoyt’s face bore such a heavy look of pain that Billyoe wisely avoided making an issue of the matter. Instead, he asked, ‘Why do you say a crisis?’

Scoyt spread his hands.

‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘A Giant suddenly appears on Deck 14 and ties up the first girl he finds in such a way that she escapes in no time. Why? So that an alarm could be given. Later he appears again down on the Drive Floors — at little risk to himself, let me add, because he can duck down one of these traps whenever he feels like it! Now: from time to time, we’ve had reports of sightings of Giants, but obviously in those cases the meeting was completely accidental; in this case, it looks as if it was not. For the first time, a Giant wanted himself to be seen; you can’t explain the pointless tying up of the girl otherwise.’

‘But why should he want to be seen and hunted?’ Councillor Ruskin asked plaintively.

‘I can see why, Councillor,’ said Marapper. ‘The Giant wanted to create a diversion while these other Giants rescued Fermour from his cell.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Scoyt, without pleasure. ‘This all happened just as we began to question Fermour; we had scarcely started to soften him up. It was a ruse to get everyone out of the way while the Giants helped Fermour to escape. Now that the Giants know we know they are about, they’ll be forced to do something — unless we do something first! Priest Marapper, get down on your hands and knees and and show me exactly what you think it was that Fermour did to make the trap-door open.’

Puffing, Marapper got down as directed. The light of every torch present centred on him. He scuffled to one corner of the trap, looking up dubiously.

‘I think Fermour was about here,’ he said. ‘And then he leant forward like this… and put his fist down on the deck like this — with his knuckles along the floor like this. And then — no, by hem, I know what he did! Scoyt, look!’

Marapper moved his clenched hand. A faint click sounded. The trap-door rose, and the way of the Giants lay open.

Laur Vyann and Roy Complain came slowly back to the inhabited part of Forwards. The shock of finding the controls ruined had been almost too much for both of them. Once again, but now more insistently than ever before, the desire to die had come over Complain; a realization of the total bleakness of his life swept through him like poison. The brief respite in Forwards, the happiness Vyann afforded him, were absolutely nothing beside the overriding frustration he had endured since birth.

As he sank down into this destroying sadness, one thing rescued him: the old Teaching of Quarters, which a little while ago he had told himself proudly he had eschewed.

Back to him echoed the voice of the priest: ‘We are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear… The Long Journey has always begun: let us rage while we can, and by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict…’ Instinctively, Complain made the formal gesture of rage. He let the anger steam up from the recesses of his misery and warm him in the withering darkness. Vyann had begun to weep on his shoulder; that she should suffer too added fuel to his fury.

He foamed it all up inside him with increasing excitement, distorting his face, calling up all the injuries he and everyone else had ever undergone, churning them, creaming them up together like batter in a bowl. Muddy, bloody, anger, keeping his heart a-beat.

After that, feeling much saner, he was able to comfort Vyann and lead her back to the regions of her own people.

As they approached the inhabited part, a curious clanging grew louder in their ears. It was an odd noise without rhythm, an ominous noise, at the sound of which they increased their pace, glancing at each other anxiously.

Almost the first person they met, a man of the farmer class, came up quickly to them.

‘Inspector Vyann,’ he said, ‘Master Scoyt is looking for you; he’s been shouting about everywhere!’

‘It sounds as if he’s pulling the ship apart for us,’ Vyann said wryly. ‘We’re on our way, thank you.’

They quickened their step, and so came upon Scoyt at Deck 20, from which Fermour had been rescued. Co-Captain Pagwam, with a squad of men, was pacing along the corridor, bending every so often and opening a series of traps in the deck. The heavy covers, flung aside, accounted for the strange clanging Vyann and Complain had heard. As each hole was revealed, a man was left to guard it while other men hurried on to the next trap.

Directing operations, Scoyt looking round saw Vyann. For once, no welcoming smile softened his mouth.

‘Come in here,’ he said, opening the door nearest to him. Somebody’s apartment, it happened to be empty just then. Scoyt shut the door when they were all three inside and confronted them angrily.

‘I’ve a mind to have you both flung into cells,’ he said. ‘How long have you been back from Gregg’s stronghold? Why did you not report straight back to me or the Council, as you were instructed to do? Where’ve you been together, I want to know?’

‘But, Roger –’ Vyann protested. ‘We haven’t been back long! Besides, you were all out on a chase when we arrived. We didn’t know the thing was so urgent, or we should have –’

‘Just a minute, Laur,’ Scoyt interrupted. ‘You’d better save the excuses: we’ve a crisis on hand. Never mind all that, I’m not interested in the frills; just tell me about Gregg.’

Seeing the hurt and angry look on Vyann’s face, Complain stepped in and gave a brief account of their interview with his brother. At the end of it, Scoyt nodded, relaxing slightly.

‘Better than I dared hope,’ he said. ‘We will send scouts to get Gregg’s party here as soon as possible. It is expedient that they move in here at once.’

‘No, Roger,’ Vyann said quickly. ‘They can’t come here. With all respects to Roy, his brother’s nothing but a brigand! His followers are nothing but a mob. They and their wives are maimed and mutated. The whole pack would bring endless trouble on to our hands if we had them living with us. They are absolutely no good for anything but fighting.’

‘That’, Scoyt said grimly, ‘is just what we want them for. You’d better get abreast with events, Laur.’ Rapidly, he told her what Marapper had seen and what was now going on.

‘Had you hurt Fermour?’ Complain asked.

‘No — just a preliminary flogging to soften him up.’

‘He was used to that sort of thing in Quarters, poor devil,’ Complain said. His own back tingled in sympathetic memory.

‘Why should all this make it so urgent to get Gregg’s mob here?’ Vyann said.

Master Scoyt sighed heavily and answered with emphasis.

‘Because’, he said, ‘here we have for the first time incontestable proof that the Outsiders and the Giants are in alliance — against us!’

He looked at them hard as this soaked in. ‘Nice position we’re in, eh?’ he said ironically. ‘That’s why I’m going to have up every trap in the ship, and a man posted by it. Eventually we’ll hunt the enemy out; I swear I won’t rest till we do.’

Complain whistled. ‘You’ll certainly need Gregg’s ruffians; manpower will be the crucial problem,’ he said. ‘But just how did Marapper manage to open that trap-door?’

‘Simply because that fat priest is the man he is, I’d say,’ Scoyt remarked with a short laugh. ‘Back in your tribe, I suppose he was pretty much of a magpie?’

‘Picked up anything he could get,’ Complain agreed, recalling the lumber in Marapper’s room.

‘One thing he picked up was a ring: a ring with an eight-sided stone, which someone must at some time have removed from a corpse. It’s not a stone actually, it’s some little mechanical device, and it fits exactly into a kind of keyhole in each trap-door: press it in and the trap opens at once. Originally — way back before the catastrophe — everybody whose duty it was to go down into these traps must have had one of these ring-keys. Councillor Tregonnin, by the way, says these between-deck places are called inspection ways; he found a reference to them in his lumber; and that’s just what we’re going to do — inspect them! We’re going to comb every inch of them. My men have Marapper’s ring now and are opening up every trap aboard.’

‘And Bob Fermour had a similar ring to Marapper’s!’ Complain exclaimed. ‘I often remember seeing it on his finger.’

‘We think all Outsiders may wear them,’ Scoyt said. ‘If so, it explains how easily they elude us. It explains a lot — although it doesn’t explain how in the past they’ve managed to spirit themselves out of cells carefully guarded on the outside. On the assumption that all who wear these rings are our enemies, I’ve got some of the Survival Team working through the entire population, looking for the giveaway. Anyone caught wearing that ring makes the Journey! Now I must go. Expansions!’

He ushered them back into the clanging corridor. At once he was surrounded by underlings wanting orders; he became gradually separated from Complain and Vyann. They heard him delegating a junior officer to bear the news to Gregg, then he turned away and his voice was lost.

‘Union with Gregg…’ Vyann said, and shivered. ‘Now what do we do? It looks as if Roger intends to give me no more work.’

‘You’re going to bed,’ Complain said. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘You don’t think I could sleep with all this noise going on, do you?’ she asked, smiling rather tiredly.

‘I think you could try.’

He was surprised with what submissiveness she let him lead her away, although she stiffened suddenly as they met Marapper loitering in a side corridor.

‘You are the hero of the hour, priest, I understand,’ she said.

Marapper’s face was ponderous with gloom; he wore injury round him like a cloak.

‘Inspector,’ he said with a bitter dignity. ‘You are taunting me. For half my wretched lifetime I go about with a priceless secret on my finger without realizing it. And then when I do realize it — behold, in a moment of quite uncharacteristic panic, I give it away to your friend Scoyt for nothing!’

II

We’ve got to get out of the ship somehow,’ Vyann murmured. Her eyes were shut as she spoke, her dark head down on the pillow. Softly, Complain crept from the dark room; she would be asleep before he closed the door, despite the chaos of sound two decks away. He stood outside Vyann’s door, half afraid to go away, wondering if this was a good time to bother the Council or Scoyt with news of the ruined controls. Indecisively, he fingered the heat gun tucked in his belt, as gradually his thoughts wandered back to more personal considerations.

Complain could not help asking himself what part he was playing in the world about him; because he was undecided what he wanted from life, he seemed to drift on a tide of events. The people nearest to him appeared to have clear-cut objectives. Marapper cared for nothing but power; Scoyt seemed content to grapple with the endless problems of the ship; and Complain’s beloved Laur wanted only to be free of the restraints of life aboard. And he? He desired her, but there was something else, the something he had promised himself as a kid without finding it, the something he could never put into words, the something too big to visualize…

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, roused suddenly by a close footstep.

A square pilot light near at hand revealed a tall man robed in white, a distinctive figure whose voice, when he spoke, was powerful and slow.

‘I am Councillor Zac Deight,’ he said. ‘Don’t be startled. You are Roy Complain, the hunter from Deadways, are you not?’

Complain took in his melancholy face and white hair, and liked the man instinctively. Instinct is not always the ally of intelligence.

‘I am, sir,’ he answered.

‘Your priest, Henry Marapper, spoke highly of you.’

‘Did he, by hem?’ Marapper often did good by stealth, but it was invariably to himself.

‘He did,’ Zac Deight said. Then his tone changed. ‘I believe you might know something about that hole I see in the corridor wall.’

He pointed at the gap Complain and Vyann had made earlier in the wall of her room.

‘Yes I do. It was made with this weapon here,’ Complain said, showing the weapon to the old Councillor and wondering what was coming next.

‘Have you told anyone else you have this?’ Zac Deight asked, turning the heat gun over with interest.

‘No. Only Laur — Inspector Vyann knows; she’s asleep at present.’

‘It should have been handed to the Council for us to make the best use of we could,’ Zac Deight said gently. ‘You ought to have realized that. Will you come to my room and tell me all about it?’

‘Well, there’s not much to tell, sir…’ Complain began.

‘You can surely see how dangerous this weapon could be in the wrong hands…’ There was something commanding in the old councillor’s tone. When he turned and made down the corridor, Complain followed that Gothic back — not happily, but without protest.

They took a lift down to the lower level, then walked five decks forward to the councillor’s apartment. It was absolutely deserted here, silent and dark. Bringing out an ordinary magnetic key, Zac Deight unlocked a door and stood aside for Complain to enter. Directly the latter had done so, the door slammed behind him. It was a trap!

Whirling round, Complain charged the door with all the fury of a wild animal — uselessly. He was too late, and Deight had the heat gun with which he might have burnt his way to freedom. Savagely, Complain flashed on his torch and surveyed the room. It was a bedroom cabin which had been disused for some while, to judge by the dust everywhere; like most such rooms throughout the length of the ship, it was spartan, anonymous.

Complain picked up a chair and battered it to bits against the locked door, after which he felt better able to think. An image swam up to him of the time when he had first stood close to Vyann, watching through a spyhole when Scoyt left Fermour alone in the interrogation room; Fermour had jumped on to a stool and tried to reach the ceiling grille. Obviously, he had expected to find an escape route that way. Now supposing…

He swung the bed into the centre of the room, tossed a locker on top of it and climbed rapidly up to examine the grille. It was similar to every other grille in every other room of the ship; three feet square, latticed with thin bars widely enough spaced to allow a finger to be poked between them. The exploring torch revealed these spaces to be silted up with dust sticky as rheumy eyes; such breeze as drained through in the room was faint indeed.

Complain heaved tentatively at the grille. It did not budge.

It had to budge. Fermour did not stand on that stool and stretch upwards just because he needed some physical jerks. Here too, if the grilles opened, would be an explanation of the way some of Scoyt’s previously captured Outsiders had escaped from guarded cells. Complain stuck his fingers through the grille and felt along its inner edge, hope and fear scampering coldly through his veins.

His index finger soon met with a simple, tongued catch. Complain pressed it over. Similar catches lay on the upper surface of the other three sides of the grille. One by one, he flicked them over. The grille lifted easily up; Complain angled it sideways, brought it down and put it quietly on the bed. His heart beat rapidly.

Catching hold of the aperture, he drew himself up into it.

There was hardly space to stir. He had expected to find himself in the inspection ways; instead he was in the ventilation system. He guessed immediately that this pipe ran through the strange inter-deck world of the inspection ways. Clicking his torch off, he strained his eyes down the low duct, ignoring the breeze that sighed continuously into his face.

One light only lit the tunnel, filtering up from the next grating along. Struck with the idea that he must look much like a cork in a bottle, Complain dragged himself forward and peered through the grille.

He was staring down into Zac Deight’s room. Zac Deight was there alone, talking into an instrument. A tall cupboard, standing now in the middle of the room, showed how the niche in the wall which housed the instrument was normally concealed. So fascinated was Complain with his novel viewpoint that for a moment he failed to hear what Zac Deight was speaking about. Then it registered with a rush.

‘… fellow Complain causing a lot of trouble,’ the Councillor said into the phone. ‘You remember when your man Andrews lost his welder a few weeks back? Somehow it has now got into Complain’s hands. I found out because I happened to come across a gaping hole in the wall of one of the compartments on Deck 22, Inspector Laur Vyann’s room… Yes, Curtis, can you hear me? This line is worse than ever…’

For a moment, Deight was silent, as the man at the other end of the line spoke. Curtis! Complain exclaimed to himself — that was the name of the Giant in charge of the mob who captured him. Looking down on the councillor, Complain suddenly noticed the give-away ring with the octagonal stone on Zac Deight’s finger, and began to wonder what ghastly web of intrigue he had blundered into.

Deight was speaking again. ‘I had the chance of slipping into Vyann’s room,’ he said, ‘while your diversion down on the Drive Floors was in full swing. And there I found something else the dizzies have got hold of: a file we never knew existed, written by the first man to captain the ship on the way back from Procyon V. It contains far more than the dizzies should know; it’ll set them questioning all sorts of things. By a stroke of luck, I have managed to get both file and welder into my possession… Thanks. Even more luckily, nobody but Complain and this girl Vyann yet know anything about — or realize the significance of — either file or laser. Now then, I know all about Little Dog’s ideas on the sanctity of dizzy lives, but they’re not up here coping with this problem, and it’s getting more difficult hour by hour — if they want their precious secret kept, there is one easy way to do it. I’ve got Complain locked in next door to me now… Of course not, no force; he just walked into the trap like an angel. Vyann is asleep in her room. What I’m asking you is this, Curtis: I want your sanction to kill Complain and Vyann… Yes, I don’t like it either, but it’s the only way we can possibly retain the status quo, and I’m prepared to do it now before it’s too late…’

Zac Deight was silent, listening, an expression of impatience creeping over his long face.

‘There isn’t time to radio Little Dog,’ he said, evidently interrupting the speaker. ‘They’d procrastinate too long. You’re in charge up here, Curtis, and all I need is your permission… That’s better… Yes, I do consider it imperative. You don’t think I enjoy the task? I shall gas them both through the air vents of their rooms, as we’ve done before in similar awkward cases. At least we know it’s painless.’

He rang off. He pushed the cupboard back into place. He stood for a while hesitating, gnawing his knuckles, his face seamed with distaste. He opened the cupboard and removed a long cylinder. He looked speculatively up at the ceiling grille. He took the blast of Complain’s dazer right in his face.

The colour fled from Zac Deight’s brow. His head flopped on to his chest and he collapsed, sprawling, on the floor.

For a minute, Complain lay where he was, his mind attempting to adjust to events. He was brought back to the immediacy of the present by a horrible sensation. An alien thought had somehow drifted among his thoughts; it was as if somebody’s thickly furred tongue licked his brain. Flipping on his torch, he found a tremendous moth hovering before his eyes. Its wing span was about five inches; the tapetum lucidum in its eyes reflected the light like two cerise pin points.

Sickened, he struck at it but missed. The moth fluttered rapidly away down the air duct. Complain recalled another moth in Deadways which had left a similar delicately dirty fingerprint on his mind. Now he thought, ‘This power the rabbits have — the moths must have it in lesser degree. And the rats seem to be able to understand them… Perhaps these moths are a sort of airborne scouts for the rat-hordes!’

This notion scared him a great deal more than hearing Deight pronounce his death sentence had done.

In a sweat of panic, he flicked back the four tongues which kept Zac Deight’s grille in place, slithered the grille along the duct and dropped down into the councillor’s room. Pulling up a table, he climbed on to it and moved the grille back into its proper position. Then he felt safer.

Zac Deight was not dead: Complain’s dazer had been turned only to half power; but he had been at close enough range to receive a shock of sufficient strength to keep him senseless for some while. He looked harmless, even benevolent, huddled on the deck with hair fallen over his ashen forehead. Complain took the councillor’s keys without a stir of compunction, collected his heat gun, unlocked the door, and let himself out into the silent corridor.

At the last moment he paused, turning back into the room to flash his torch up at the grille. Sharp little pink hands grasped the bars, a dozen sharp faces hated down at him. Hair prickling up his neck, Complain gave them the daze. The little burning eyes lost their brilliance at once, the pink hands relaxed their grip.

Squeals following him down the corridor told Complain he had also winged concealed reinforcements.

His ideas flowed fast as he walked. One thing he stubbornly determined: Councillor Deight’s role in this affair, and all that he had said on the strange instrument to Curtis (where was Curtis?) should be mentioned to nobody until he had discussed it with Vyann. They could no longer tell who was on their side and who was not.

‘Just supposing Vyann…’ he began aloud; but he quickly tucked that dread away. There was a point where distrust merged with insanity.

A practical item worried Complain, but he could not quite formulate it. It was something to do with the rescue of Fermour… No, it would have to wait. He was too anxious to reason coolly; he would consider it later. Meanwhile, he wanted to give the heat gun, the welder, as Deight had called it, over to somebody who could make best use of it: Master Scoyt.

The excitement round Scoyt had gloriously increased; he had transferred himself into the centre of a whirlpool of activity.

The barriers between Forwards and Deadways had been broken down. Sweating men busily tore down the barricades, relishing the work of destruction.

‘Take them away!’ Scoyt shouted. ‘We thought they guarded our frontiers, but now that our frontiers are all round us, they are useless.’

Through the broken barriers, the tribe of Gregg came. Ragged and filthy, male or female or hermaphrodite, well or wounded, on foot or on rough stretchers, they docked excitedly among the watching Forwarders. They bore bundles and bedding rolls and boxes and panniers; some pulled crude sledges they had dragged through the ponics; one woman drove her belongings before her on the back of an emaciated sheep. With them all flew the black midges of Deadways. Such was the fever of excitement which simmered over Forwards, that this animated gaggle of squalor was greeted with welcoming smiles and an occasional cheer. The tattered legion waved back. Roffery had been left behind; he was considered near enough dead to make any trouble expended on his account worthless.

One thing at least was clear: the outcasts, wounded though many of them were from their encounter with the rats, were prepared to fight. Every man jack of them was loaded down with dazers, knives and improvised pikes.

Gregg himself, accompanied by his weird henchman, Hawl, was conferring with Scoyt, Pagwam and Councillor Ruskin behind a closed door when Complain arrived on the scene. Without ceremony, he thrust his way into the room. He savoured an unprecedented confidence which even their shouts at his intrusion did not sap.

‘I’ve come to help you,’ he said, facing Scoyt as the natural leader there. ‘I’ve two things for you, and the first is a bit of information. We’ve discovered that there are trapdoors on every level of every deck; that is only one way the Giants and Outsiders can escape. They also have a handy exit in every single room!’

He jumped up on to the table and demonstrated to them how a grille opened. Climbing down again without comment, he enjoyed the surprised look in their faces.

‘That’s something else for you to watch, Master Scoyt,’ he said. And then the point about Fermour’s escape that had been troubling him slid into his mind without effort; instantly, a slice more of the puzzle became clear.

‘Somewhere in the ship, the Giants have a headquarters,’ he said. ‘They took me to it when they caught me, but I don’t know where it is — I was gassed. But obviously it’s in a part of a deck or level cut off from us, deliberately or by design. There are plenty such places in the ship — that’s where we have to look.’

‘We’ve already decided that,’ said Gregg, impatiently. ‘The trouble is, things are in such a muddle, on most decks we don’t know when a bit’s cut off and when it isn’t. An army could be hiding behind any bulkhead.’

‘I’ll tell you one such place near at hand,’ Complain said tensely. ‘Above the cell Fermour was kept in, on Deck 21.’

‘What makes you think that, Complain?’ Scoyt asked curiously.

‘Deduction. The Giants, as we have realized, went to an enormous amount of trouble to lure everyone away from the corridors so that they could get to Fermour and rescue him via the trap-doors. They could have spared themselves all that bother if they had simply pulled him up through the grille in his cell. It would not have taken them a minute, and they could have remained unseen. Why didn’t they? My guess is, because they couldn’t. Because something on the level above has collapsed, blocking that grille. In other words, there may be chambers up there we have no access to. We ought to see what’s in them.’

‘I tell you there are a hundred such places –’ Gregg began.

‘It certainly sounds worth investigating –’ Councillor Ruskin said.

‘Suppose you’re right, Complain,’ Scoyt interrupted. ‘If the grille’s blocked, how do we get through?’

‘Like this!’ Complain levelled the heat gun at the nearest wall, fanning it horizontally. The wall began to drip away. He switched off power when a ragged archway had formed, and looked challengingly at them. For a moment all were silent.

‘Gawd’s blood!’ Gregg croaked. ‘That’s the thing I gave you.’

‘Yes. And that’s how you use it. It’s not a real weapon, as you thought — it’s a flame projector.’

Scoyt stood up. His face was flushed.

‘Let’s get down to Deck 21,’ he said. ‘Pagwam, keep your men pulling up trap-doors as fast as you can circulate that ring. Complain, you’ve done well. We’ll try that gadget out at once.’

They moved out in a body, Scoyt leading. He gripped Complain’s arm gratefully.

‘Given time, we can pull the damn ship apart with that weapon,’ he said. It was a remark which did not fully register on Complain until much later.

Chaos reigned on the middle level of Deck 21, where Fermour’s cell was. All the manholes were exposed, each being now guarded by a sentry; their covers were flung aside in untidy piles. The few people who lived here — mostly men of the barriers and their families — were evacuating before further trouble came, straggling among the sentries, getting in everyone’s way. Scoyt elbowed his way roughly through them, pushing squeaking children to right and left.

As they flung open Fermour’s cell door, Complain felt a hand on his arm. He turned, and there was Vyann, fresh and bright of eye.

‘I thought you were asleep!’ he exclaimed, smiling with the delight of seeing her again.

‘Do you realize it’s within a watch of waking?’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m told things are about to happen. I had to come and see that you didn’t get into trouble.’

Complain pressed her hand.

‘I’ve been in and out of it while you were sleeping,’ he said cheerfully.

Gregg was already in the middle of the cell, standing on the battered crate which served here as a chair, peering up at the grille above his head.

‘Roy’s right!’ he announced. ‘There’s an obstruction on the other side of this thing. I can see some crumpled metal up there. Hand me up that heat gun and let’s try our luck.’

‘Stand from under!’ Complain warned him. ‘Or you’ll shower yourself with melted metal.’

Nodding, Gregg aimed the weapon as Scoyt handed it up, and depressed the button. The glassy arc of heat bit into the ceiling, drawing a red weal on it. The weal broadened, the ceiling sagged, metal came gooing down like shreds of pulverized flesh. Through the livid hole, other metal showed; it too, began to glow lividly. Noise filled the room, smoke cascaded about them and out into the corridor, bitter smoke which rasped their eyeballs. Above the uproar came a crackling explosion, and just for a second the lights flashed on with unexpected brilliance then died away to nothing.

‘That should do it!’ Gregg exclaimed with immense satisfaction, climbing down from his perch and eyeing the gaping ruin above him. His beard twitched in excitement.

‘I really think we ought to hold a full Council meeting before we do anything as drastic as this, Master Scoyt!’ Councillor Ruskin said plaintively, surveying the ruin of the cell.

‘We’ve done nothing but hold Council meetings for years,’ Scoyt said. ‘Now we’re going to act.’

He ran into the corridor and bellowed furiously, producing in very short time a dozen armed men and a ladder.

Complain, who felt he had more experience of this kind of thing than the others, went to fetch a bucket of water from the nearby guards’ quarters, flinging it up over the tortured metal to cool it. In the ensuing cloud of steam, Scoyt thrust the ladder into place and climbed up with his dazer ready. One by one, as quickly as possible, the others followed, Vyann keeping close to Complain. Soon the whole party stood in the strange room above the cell.

It was overwhelmingly hot; the air was hard to breathe. Their torches soon picked out the reason for the blocked grille and the collapsed inspection way below their feet: the floor of this chamber had undergone a terrific denting in some long-past explosion. A machine — perhaps left untended in the time of the Nine Day Ague, Complain thought — had blown up, ruining every article and wall in the place. A staggering quantity of splintered glass and silicone was scattered all over the floor. The walls were pitted with shrapnel. But there was not a trace of a Giant.

‘Come on!’ Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the wreckage towards one of two doors. ‘Let’s not waste time here.’

The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the laser and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their torch beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.

‘No sign of life…’ Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of unease.

They stood in a side corridor, sealed off from the rest of the ship, entombed, scattering their torchlight about convulsively. It was so achingly hot they could hardly see over their cheek bones.

One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice was stencilled. Crowding together, they shuffled to read what it said:

DUTYMEN ONLY CARGO HATCH — AIR LOCK

DANGER!

A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN UNTIL YOU GET THE SIGNAL’. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.

‘What are you doing — waiting to get a signal?’ Hawl grated at them. ‘Melt the door down, Captain!’

‘Wait!’ Scoyt said. ‘We ought to be careful here. What’s an air lock, I’d like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks, but what’s an air lock?’

‘Never mind what it is. Melt it down!’ Hawl repeated, waggling his grotesque head. ‘It’s your lousy ship, Captain — make yourself at home!’

Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.

‘Must be special metal,’ he said.

One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone laughed sharply at the slackening of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed. They were free to move into the cargo air lock.

Instead of moving, they stood pixilated by a stream of light which beat remorselessly upon them. The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window looking into space.

This was not the meagre pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained rooted in the entrance.

Beyond the window, with stars tossed prodigiously into it like jewels into an emperor’s sack, roared the unending stillness of space. It was something beyond the comprehension to gaze upon, the mightiest paradox of all, for although it gave an impression of unyielding blackness, every last pocket of it glistened with multi-coloured pangs of light.

Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.

Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright blind blue as a new-born kitten’s eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm’s length. It scintillated into dazzling white at its centre, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.

Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the miracle of it. They were struck dumb, deaf and dizzy by its sublimity.

At last it was Vyann who spoke.

‘Oh, Roy darling,’ she whispered. ‘We have arrived somewhere, after all! There’s still a hope for us, there’s still some sort of a hope.’

Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something was he had wanted all his life.

It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was just to see Laur’s face — by sunlight.

III

Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to every man, woman and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident was a mere irrelevance, almost a set-back in the priority task of hunting down the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a cat-nap and some food, he proceeded to put into action.

The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going entirely to dismantle Deck 25.

Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it, and you would have a perfect no-man’s-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a hunt could be started down all the inspection ways and the Giants would be unable to escape.

Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt’s aid, willing to do anything they could to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain, sweating warriors, many of them Gregg’s men, who had experience of such tasks, attacked the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the clearance men, looting, gutting and filleting the place.

And so as soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat gun, blazing round the sides of the walls till the walls came tumbling down; they were carted off directly they were cool enough to touch. The laser did not melt the plastic which actually divided deck from deck — that metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air lock doors were built, something extra tough — but everything else fell away before it.

Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room marked ‘Laundry’. Splitting open a boiler, two of Gregg’s men revealed a crazy little maze of rat buildings, a rodent village. Different levels and flights of a bewildering complexity of design had been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth. There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters, rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and there were the rats, in nurseries and studs and armouries and slaughter houses. As Scoyt thrust the heat gun into the miniature city and it crackled up in flames, the rodents poured out savagely, leaping to the attack.

Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back. Gregg’s two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along the human chain, and demolition continued.

By now, the corridors of decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of trap-doors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.

‘The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable,’ Councillor Tregonnin protested. ‘This is destroying for destroying’s sake.’

He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin were present. Pagwam and other officers of the Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac Deight were missing.

By the messengers which had been despatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt had sent back word that he was ‘too busy’. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin’s request to fetch up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight’s sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor — but might there not be other traitors here, whom it would be wiser not to warn?

‘The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,’ Hawl shouted. ‘That’s obvious enough; why make an issue of it?’

‘You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled apart!’ Councillor Dupont protested.

‘It would get rid of the rats, anyway,’ Hawl said, and cackled with laughter.

Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the members of the Council; neither side liked the other’s manners. The meeting was disorganized for another reason: nobody could decide whether they wanted most to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange planet.

At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the situation.

‘What it amounts to’, he said, ‘is this. Scoyt’s policy can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be captured but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship down on to the surface of this planet.’

There was a general murmur of agreement at this.

‘Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge,’ Billyoe said, ‘since they built the ship in the first place.’

‘Then let’s get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some support,’ Gregg said, standing up.

‘There is just one other thing I would like to say before you go,’ Tregonnin said, ‘and that is, that our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth.’

The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.

Complain’s voice cut through the uproar.

‘The planet is not Earth!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We must be far away from Earth — twenty-three generations have passed on this ship: Earth should have been reached in seven!’

He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful and demanding.

He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation exactly as it was; they must be told everything — about the ruined controls, about Captain Gregory Complain’s journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told everything — the problem had grown far too urgent for any one man to cope with it. But before he could utter another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood there, faces distorted with fear.

‘The Giants are attacking!’ they shouted.

Stinking, blinding, smoke coiled through the decks of Forwards. The piled rubbish evacuated from Deck 25 on to Decks 24 and 23 had been set alight. Nobody cared; everyone was suddenly a pyromaniac. Automatic devices throughout most of the ship had a simple way of coping with outbreaks of fire: they closed off the room in which the fire began and exhausted the air from it. Unluckily, this fire was started in a room where the devices had failed, and in the open corridors.

Scoyt and his fellow destroyers worked on uncomplainingly in the smoke. An impartial observer, seeing these men, would have known that an inner fury possessed them; that a life-long hatred of the ship which imprisoned them had at last found expression and was working itself out with uncheckable force.

The Giants struck cleverly.

Scoyt had just burnt round one wall of a small washroom and was resting while three of his men removed the wall, so that it shielded him momentarily from the view of the others. At that instant, the grille overhead was whipped away, and a Giant fired a gas pellet at Scoyt. It caught the Master in the face. He collapsed without a sound.

A cord ladder snaked down from the grille. One of the Giants skipped down it and seized the heat gun from Scoyt’s limp grasp. As he did so, the severed wall toppled over on top of him and stunned him: the three handlers had been careless and did not mean to let it go. They stared in utter surprise at the Giant. As they did so, three more Giants dropped down the ladder, fired at them, picked up their mate and the heat gun and attempted to get back to safety.

Despite the smoke, other people had seen this foray. One of Gregg’s ablest assassins, a fellow called Black, sprang forward. The hindmost Giant, who had just reached the grille, came crashing down again with a knife stuck in his back; the heat gun rolled from his grasp. Shouting for assistance, Black retrieved his knife and bounded up the ladder. He, too, fell back to the floor with a face full of gas. Others were behind him. Jumping him, they pressed on, swarming up the ladder and through the grille.

Then began a terrific running fight in the cramped space of the inspection ways. The Giants had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection way proper, but were hampered in their retreat by their injured companion. Reinforcements arrived for them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain. Meanwhile, round pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in increasing numbers.

It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection ways ran round every level and between each deck. They were unlit; the torches which now erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was hell: friend could no longer be told from foe.

At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the Forwarders obeyed him now Scoyt was temporarily out of action.

‘Somebody bring me that heat gun,’ he bellowed. ‘Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear.’

It was an excellent idea. The only drawback — and it explained how the Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of all trap-doors — was that the inspection ways extended right round the circumference of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper levels. Until this was realized, the Giants’ movements could never be blocked. The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming wildly down the trap-doors, could not find the enemy.

Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.

Never before had the inspection ways been open to the inhabitants of the ship; never before had a madly brandished laser played among all those delicate capillaries of the vessel.

Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.

‘Switch that thing off, you crazy loon!’ one of the Forwards men, sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.

For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.

A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live wire flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died without a chirp.

The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into being. Nothing so quickly produces panic as the sensation of falling. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist…

During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.

He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt’s hair: he could also smell burning. A glance upwards showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the overhead grilles.

‘That fire the fools started two decks down — the air duct system is going to carry the smoke everywhere!’ he exclaimed to Vyann. ‘It ought to be stopped.’

‘If we could only close the inter-deck doors…’ she said. ‘Ought we to get Roger out of here?’

Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.

‘Mutiny!’ he said. ‘Mutiny! I feared as much. Oh hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that that Deadways gang should never be allowed in here. Can’t you rouse Scoyt? He’d know what to do! I’m not supposed to be a man of action.’

Complain fixed him with a surly eye. The little librarian was almost dancing on his toes, his face gawky with excitement.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked.

With a visible effort, Tregonnin pulled himself up before that contemptuous stare.

‘The ship is being wrecked,’ he said, more steadily. ‘That madman Hawl — the fellow with the little head — has the heat gun. Your brother was injured. Now most of his gang — and many of our men — are simply pulling everywhere to bits. I ordered them to stop and surrender the gun, but they just laughed at me.’

‘They’ll obey Scoyt,’ Complain said grimly. He began shaking Scoyt insistently.

‘I’m afraid, Roy. I can’t help feeling something terrible is going to happen,’ Vyann said.

One glance at her face told Complain how worried she was. He stood up beside her, stroking her upper arm.

‘Keep working on Master Scoyt, Councillor,’ he told Tregonnin. ‘He’ll soon be lively enough to solve all your problems for you. We’ll be back.’

He hustled a surprised Vyann out into the corridor. A thin dribble of water crept along the deck, dripping into the manholes.

‘Now what?’ she asked him.

‘I was a fool not to think of this before,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to risk pulling the place down about our heads to get to the Giants — unless there is another way. And there is another way. Zac Deight has an instrument in his room by which he spoke to Curtis, the Giants’ leader.’

‘Don’t you remember, Roy, Marapper said Zac Deight had gone?’ she said.

‘We may be able to find the way to work the instrument without him,’ Complain replied. ‘Or we may find something else there that will be useful to us. We are doing no good here, that’s sure.’

He spoke ironically, as six Forwards men, pelting silently along, brushed past him. Everyone seemed to be on the run, splashing down the corridors; no doubt the spiked stench of burning hustled them on. Taking Vyann’s soft hand, Complain led her rapidly along to Deck 17 and down to the lower level. The trap-door covers lay about like discarded gravestones, but already the guards over them had deserted their posts to seek excitement elsewhere.

Halting before the room in which he had left the dazed councillor, Complain levelled his torch and flung open the door.

Zac Deight was there, sitting on a metal stool. So was Marapper, his bulky body eased into a chair; he had a dazer clamped in his hand.

‘Expansions to your egos, children,’ he said. ‘Come in, Roy, come in. And you too, Inspector Vyann, my dear!’

IV

‘What the hull do you think you’re doing here, Marapper, you oily old villain?’ Complain asked in surprise.

The priest, ignoring this unpleasant form of address, which Complain would never have employed in the old days, was as usual only too ready to explain. He was here, he said, with the express purpose of torturing the last secret of the ship out of Zac Deight, but had hardly begun to do so since, although he had been here some while, he had only just managed to pull the councillor back to consciousness.

‘But you told the council meeting he was not here when you came to look for him,’ Vyann said.

‘I didn’t want them pulling Deight to bits for being an Outsider before I got at him,’ Marapper said.

‘How long have you known he was an Outsider?’ Complain asked suspiciously.

‘Since I came in and found him on the ground — with an octagonal ring on his finger,’ Marapper said, with a certain amount of smugness in his tone. ‘And I’ve so far elicited one thing from him, with the help of a knife under his fingernails. The Outsiders and Giants come from the planet you saw outside; but they can’t get back there till a ship comes up to get them. This ship can’t go down there.’

‘Of course it can’t, it’s out of control,’ Vyann said. ‘Priest Marapper, you are wasting your time. I also cannot allow you to torture this councillor, whom I have known since I was a girl.’

‘Don’t forget he was going to kill us!’ Complain reminded her. She made no answer beyond looking stubbornly at him, knowing, woman-like, that she had an argument superior to reason.

‘I had no alternative but to try and remove you both,’ Zac Deight said huskily. ‘If you will save me from this horrible creature I will do anything — within reason.’

There are few more awkward situations in the world than to be dragged into a three-cornered argument between a priest and a girl; Complain did not enjoy the position. He would have been contented enough to let Marapper wring information out of Deight by any means possible, but with Vyann present he could not do it; nor could he explain his sudden sensitivity to the priest. They began a wrangle. It was interrupted by a noise nearby, a curious noise, a scraping rustle, frightening because it was unidentifiable. It grew louder. Suddenly, it was overhead.

Rats were on the move! They drummed along the air duct above this level; across the grille Complain had recently climbed through, pattering pink feet came and went, as the tribe thundered by. Dust showered down into the room, and with the dust came smoke.

‘That sort of thing’ll be happening all over the ship,’ Complain told Zac Deight gravely, when the stampede had gone by. ‘The fire is driving the rats out of their holes. Given time, the men will gut the place absolutely. They’ll find your secret hideout in the end, if they kill us all doing it. If you know what’s good for you, Deight, you’ll get on that instrument and tell Curtis to come out with his hands up.’

‘If I did, they would never obey,’ Zac Deight said. His hands, paper-thin, rustled together on his lap.

‘That’s my worry,’ Complain said. ‘Where is this Little Dog? — Down on the outside of the planet?’

Zac Deight nodded confirmation miserably. He kept clearing his throat, a nervous trick which betrayed the strain he was undergoing.

‘Get up and tell Curtis to speak to Little Dog double quick and make them send a ship up here for us,’ Complain said. He drew his dazer, aiming it steadily at Deight.

‘I’m the only one who flashes dazers here!’ Marapper shouted. ‘Deight’s my captive.’ Jumping up, he came towards Complain with his own weapon raised. Savagely, Complain booted it out of his hand.

‘We can’t afford to have three sides in this argument, priest,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to stay in on this, stay quiet. Otherwise, get out. Now then, Deight, have you made up your mind?’

Zac Deight stood up helplessly, twisting his face with indecision.

‘I don’t know what to do. You don’t understand the position at all,’ he said. ‘I really would help you if I could. You seem a reasonable man, Complain, at heart; if only you and I –’

‘I’m not reasonable!’ Complain shouted. ‘I’m anything but reasonable! Get on to Curtis! Go on, you old fox, move! Get a ship up here!’

‘Inspector Vyann, can’t you –’ Zac Deight said.

‘Yes, Roy, please –’ Vyann began.

‘No!’ Complain roared. It was hell the way everyone had wills of their own, even women. ‘These beggars are responsible for all our miseries. Now they’re going to get us out of trouble or else.’

Seizing one end of the bookcase, he pulled it angrily away from the wall. The phone stood there on its niche, neutral and silent, ready to convey any message spoken into it.

‘This time my dazer’s at “lethal”, Deight,’ Complain said. ‘You have the count of three to begin talking. One… two…’

Tears stood in Zac Deight’s eyes as he lifted the receiver. It shook in his grasp.

‘Get me Crane Curtis, will you?’ he said, when a voice spoke at the other end. Possessed as he was, Complain could not restrain a thrill shooting through him, to think that this instrument was now connected with the secret stronghold in the ship.

When Curtis came on, all four in the room could hear his voice distinctly. It was pitched high with anxiety; he talked so rapidly he hardly sounded like a Giant. He began speaking at once, before the old councillor could get a word in.

‘Deight? You’ve slipped up somewhere,’ he said. ‘I always said you were too old for this job! The damned dizzies have got that laser in action. I thought you told me you had it? They’re running amok with it — absolutely berserk. Some of the boys tried to get it back but failed, and now the ship’s on fire near us. This is your doing! You’re going to take the responsibility for this…’

During this flow of words, Zac Deight subtly changed, slipping back into something like his old dignity. The receiver steadied in his hand.

‘Curtis!’ he said. The command in his tone brought a sudden pause on the line. ‘Curtis, pull yourself together. This is no time for recriminations. Bigger matters are at stake. You’ll have to get Little Dog and tell them –’

‘Little Dog!’ Curtis cried. He went back into full spate again. ‘I can’t get on to Little Dog. Why don’t you listen to what I’ve got to say? Some crazy dizzie, monkeying with the laser, has severed a power cable on the middle level of Deck 20, just below us here. The structure’s live all round us. Four of our men are out cold with shock. It’s blown our radio, our intercom and our lighting. We’re stuck. We can’t raise Little Dog and we can’t get out…’

Zac Deight groaned. He turned hopelessly away from the phone, gesturing at Complain.

‘We’re finished,’ he said. ‘You heard that.’

Complain poked the dazer into his thin ribs. ‘Keep quiet,’ he hissed. ‘Curtis hasn’t finished speaking yet.’

The phone was still barking.

‘Are you there, Deight? Why don’t you answer?’

‘I’m here,’ Deight replied wearily.

‘Then answer. Do you think I’m talking for fun?’ Curtis snapped. ‘There’s just one chance for us all. Up in the personnel hatch on Deck 10, there’s an emergency transmitter. Got that? We’re all bottled up here like lobsters in a pot. We can’t get out. You’re out. You’ve got to get to that transmitter and radio Little Dog for help. Can you do that?’

The dazer was eager at Zac Deight’s ribs now.

‘I’ll try,’ he said.

‘You’d better try! It’s our only hope. And, Deight…’

‘Yes?’

‘For God’s sake tell ’em to come armed — and quick.’

‘All right.’

‘Get into inspectionways and take a trolley.’

‘All right, Curtis.’

‘And hurry, man. For heaven’s sake hurry.’

A long, fruity silence followed Zac Deight’s switching off.

‘Are you going to let me get to that radio?’ Deight asked.

Complain nodded.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get a ship to us.’ He turned to Vyann. She had brought the old councillor a beaker of water which he accepted gratefully.

‘Laur,’ Complain said, ‘will you please go back and tell Roger Scoyt, who should be revived by now, that the Giants’ hideout is somewhere on the upper level of Deck 20. Tell him to wipe them all out as soon as possible. Tell him to go carefully: there’s danger of some sort there. Tell him — tell him there’s one particular Giant called Curtis who ought to be launched very slowly on the Long Journey. Take care of yourself, Laur. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Vyann said: ‘Couldn’t Marapper go instead of –’

‘I’d like the message to arrive straight,’ Complain said bluntly.

‘Do be careful,’ she begged him.

‘He’ll be all right,’ Marapper said roughly. ‘Despite the insults, I’m going with him. My bladder tells me something very nasty is brewing.’

In the corridor, the square pilot lights greeted them. Their intermittent blue patches did little to make the darkness less creepy, and Complain watched Laur Vyann go off with some misgivings. Reluctantly, he turned to splash after Marapper and Zac Deight; the latter was already lowering himself down an open trap while the priest hovered unhappily over him.

‘Wait!’ Marapper said. ‘What about the rats down there?’

‘You and Complain have dazers,’ Zac Deight said mildly.

The remark did not seem entirely to remove Marapper’s uneasiness.

‘Alas, I fear that trap-door is too small for me to squeeze down!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am a large man, Roy.’

‘You’re a bigger liar,’ Complain said. ‘Go on, get down. We’ll have to keep our eyes open for the rats. With luck, they’ll be too busy to worry about us now.’

They bundled down into the inspection ways, crawling on hands and knees over to the double rail which carried the low trucks belonging to this level from one end of the ship to the other. No truck was there. They crawled along the tracks, through the narrow opening in the inter-deck metal which, even here, stood between one deck and another, and on into a third deck until they found a truck. Under Zac Deight’s direction, they climbed on to its platform and lay flat.

With a touch at the controls, they were off, gathering speed quickly. The deck intersections flicked by only a few inches above their heads. Marapper groaned as he attempted to draw in his stomach, but in a short time they slowed, arriving at Deck 10. The councillor stopped the truck and they got off again.

In this far end of the ship, evidence of rats abounded. Droppings and shreds of fabric littered the floor. Marapper kept his torch constantly swinging from side to side.

Having stopped the truck just inside the deck, they could stand up. Above and round them, four feet wide, the inspection ways here became a washer between two wheels of deck, its width crossed by a veritable entanglement of girders, braces, pipes and ducts, and by the immense tubes which carried the ship’s corridors. A steel ladder ran up into the darkness over their heads.

‘The personnel lock, of course, is on the upper level,’ Zac Deight said. Taking hold of the rungs of the ladder, he began to climb.

As he followed, Complain noted many signs of damage on either side of them, as if, in the rooms between which they now ascended, ancient detonations had occurred. Even as he thought the thought-picture ‘detonation’, a bellow of sound vibrated through the inspection ways, setting up resonances and groans in a variety of pipes until the place sang like an orchestra.

‘Your people are still wrecking the ship,’ Zac Deight said coldly.

‘Let’s hope they kill off a few squadrons of Giants at the same time,’ Marapper said.

‘Squadrons!’ Deight exclaimed. ‘Just how many “Giants”, as you call them, do you reckon are aboard ship?’

When the priest did not reply, Deight answered himself. ‘There are exactly twelve of them, poor devils,’ he said. ‘Thirteen including Curtis.’

For an instant, Complain nearly succeeded in viewing the situation through the eyes of a man he had never seen, through Curtis’s eyes. He saw that worried official boxed up somewhere in ruined rooms, in darkness, while everyone else in the ship hunted savagely for his place of concealment. It was not a grand picture.

No time was left for further thought. They reached the upper level, crawling horizontally once more to the nearest trap-door. Zac Deight inserted his octagonal ring in it and it opened above their heads. As they climbed out, a spray of tiny moths burst round their shoulders, hovered, then fluttered off down the dark corridor. Quickly Complain whipped up his dazer and fired at them; by the light of Marapper’s torch, he had the satisfaction of seeing most of them drop to the deck.

‘I just hope none got away,’ he said. ‘I’ll swear those things act as scouts for the rats.’

The damage in this region was as bad as any Complain and Marapper had seen so far. Hardly a wall stood straight in any direction. Glass and debris lay thickly everywhere, except where it had been brushed away to make a narrow path. Down this path they walked, every sense alert.

‘What was this place?’ Complain asked curiously. ‘I mean, when it was a place.’

Zac Deight continued to walk forward without replying, his face bleak and absorbed.

‘What was this place, Deight?’ Complain repeated.

‘Oh… Most of the deck was Medical Research,’ Deight said, in a pre-occupied fashion. ‘In the end, I believe, a neglected computor blew itself to bits. You can’t reach this part by the ordinary lifts and corridors of the ship; it’s completely sealed off. A tomb within a tomb.’

Complain felt a thrill inside him. Medical Research! This was where, twenty-three generations ago, June Besti, the discoverer of bestine, had worked. He tried to visualize her bent over a bench, but could only think of Laur.

So they came to the personnel air lock. It looked much like a smaller edition of the cargo lock, with similar-looking wheels and danger notices. Zac Deight crossed to one of the wheels, still with his abstracted look.

‘Wait!’ Marapper said urgently. ‘Roy, as guile’s my guide, I swear this wretch has something tricky up his stinking sleeves for us. He’s leading us into danger.’

‘If there’s anyone waiting in here, Deight,’ Complain said, ‘they and you make the Journey without delay. I’m warning you.’

Deight turned to face them. The look of unbearable strain clenched over his countenance might have won him pity in a quieter moment, from other company.

‘There’s nobody there,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘You need not be afraid.’

‘The… radio thing is in here?’ Complain asked.

‘Yes.’

Marapper seized Complain’s arm, keeping his torch burning in Deight’s face.

‘You’re not really going to let him talk to this Little Dog place, are you, and tell them to come up here armed?’

‘You needn’t think me a fool, priest,’ Complain said, ‘just because I happened to be born in your parish. Deight will give the message we tell him to. Open up, Councillor!’

The door swung open, and there was the lock, about five paces square, with six metal space suits standing like suits of armour against one wall. Except for the suits, there was only one other object in the room: the radio, a small, portable job with carrying straps and telescopic aerial.

Like the cargo lock, this lock had a window. The four personnel and two cargo locks distributed down the length of the ship carried, apart from the now shuttered blister of the Control Room, the only ports in the ship. Having a different co-efficient of expansion from the rest of the great outer envelope, they naturally represented a weakness, and as such had been constructed only where it might be strictly necessary to see out. For Marapper, it was the first time he had had such a view.

He was as overwhelmed with awe as the others had been. Breathlessly, he gazed out at the mighty void, for once completely robbed of words.

The planet now showed a wider crescent than the last time Complain had seen it. Mixed with the blinding blue of it were whites and greens, glistening under its casing of atmosphere as no colours had ever glistened before. Some distance from this compelling crescent, tiny by comparison, the sun burned brighter than life itself.

Marapper pointed at it in fascination.

‘What’s that? A sun?’ he asked.

Complain nodded.

‘Holy smother!’ Marapper exclaimed, staggered. ‘It’s round! Somehow I’d always expected it would be square — like a big pilot light!’

Zac Deight had gone over to the radio. As he picked it up, tremblingly, he turned to the others.

‘You may as well know now,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, I may as well tell you. That planet — it’s Earth!’

‘What?’ Complain said. A rush of questions assailed him. ‘You’re lying, Deight! You must be. It can’t be Earth! We know it can’t be Earth!’

The old man was suddenly weeping, the long salt tears raining down his cheeks. He hardly tried to check them.

‘You ought to be told,’ he said. ‘You’ve all suffered so much… too much. That’s Earth out there — but you can’t go to it. The Long Journey… the Long Journey has got to go on forever. It’s just one of those cruel things.’

Complain grabbed him by his scrawny throat.

‘Listen to me, Deight,’ he snarled. ‘If that’s Earth, why aren’t we down there, and who are you — and the Outsiders — and the Giants? Who are you all, eh? Who are you?’

‘We’re — we’re from Earth,’ Zac Deight husked. He waved his hands fruitlessly before Complain’s contorted face; he was being shaken like an uprooted ponic stalk. Marapper was shouting in Complain’s ear and wrenching at his shoulder. They were all shouting together, Deight’s face growing crimson under Complain’s tightening grasp. They barged into the space suits and sent two crashing to the floor, sprawling on top of them. Then finally the priest managed to pry Complain’s fingers away from the councillor’s throat.

‘You’re crazy, Roy!’ he gasped. ‘You’ve gone crazy! You were throttling him to death.’

‘Didn’t you hear what he said?’ Complain shouted. ‘We’re victims of some dreadful conspiracy –’

‘Make him speak to Little Dog first — make him speak first — he’s the only one who can work this radio thing! Make him speak, Roy. You can kill him and ask questions after.’

Gradually the words filtered into Complain’s comprehension. The blinding anger and frustration ebbed like a crimson tide from his mind. Marapper, as always canny where his own safety was concerned, had spoken wisely. With an effort, Complain gained control of himself again. He stood up and dragged Deight roughly to his feet.

‘What is Little Dog?’ he asked.

‘It’s… it’s the code name for an institute on the planet, set up to study the inmates of this ship,’ Zac Deight said, rubbing his throat.

‘To study!… Well, get on to them right quick and say — say some of your men are ill and they’ve got to send a ship straight away to fetch them down to Earth. And don’t say anything else or we’ll tear you apart and feed you to the rats. Go on!’

‘Ah!’ Marapper rubbed his hands in appreciation and gave his cloak a tug down at the back. ‘That’s spoken like a true believer, Roy. You’re my favourite sinner. And when the ship gets here, we overpower the crew and go back to Earth in it. Everyone goes! Everyone! Every man, woman and mutant from here to Sternstairs!’

Zac Deight cradled the set in his arm, switching on power. Then, braving their anger, he mustered his courage and turned to face them.

‘Let me just say this to you both,’ he said, with dignity. ‘Whatever happens — and I greatly fear the outcome of all this terrible affair — I’d like you to remember what I am telling you. You feel cheated, rightly. Your lives are enclosed in suffering by the narrow walls of this ship. But wherever you lived, in whatsoever place or time, your lives would not be free of pain. For everyone in the universe, life is a long, hard journey. If you –’

‘That’ll do, Deight,’ Complain said. ‘We’re not asking for paradise: we’re demanding to choose where we suffer. Start talking to Little Dog.’

Resignedly, his face pale, Zac Deight started to call, all too aware of the dazer a yard from his face. In a moment, a clear voice from the plastic box said: ‘Hullo, Big Dog. Little Dog here, receiving you loud and clear. Back.’

‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ Zac Deight said, then stopped. He painfully cleared his throat. The sweat coursed down his forehead. As he paused, Complain’s weapon jerked under his nose, and he began again, staring momentarily out at the sun in anguish. ‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ he said. ‘Will you please send up a ship to us at once — the dizzies are loose! Help! Help! The dizzies are loose! Come armed! The dizzies — aaargh!…’

He took Complain’s blast in the teeth, Marapper’s in the small of his back. He crumpled over, the radio chattering as it fell with him. He did not even twitch. He was dead before he hit the deck. Marapper seized the instrument up from the floor.

‘All right!’ he bawled into it. ‘Come and get us, you stinking scab-devourers! Come and get us!’

With a heave of his arm, the priest sent the set shattering against the bulkhead. Then, with characteristic change of mood, he fell on his knees before Zac Deight’s body, in the first gesture of prostration, and began the last obsequies over it.

Fists clenched, Complain stared numbly out at the planet. He could not join the priest. The compulsion to perform ritual gestures over the dead had left him; he seemed to have grown beyond superstition. But what transfixed him was a realization which evidently had not occurred to Marapper, a realization which cancelled all their hopes.

After a thousand delays, they had found Earth was near. Earth was their true home. And Earth, on Zac Deight’s admission, had been taken over by Giants and Outsiders. It was against that revelation Complain had burnt his anger in vain.

V

Laur Vyann stood silent and helpless, watching the furious activity on Deck 20. She managed to stand by wedging herself in a broken doorway: the gravity lines on this deck had been severed in the assaults of Master Scoyt’s stormtroopers. Now directions in the three concentric levels had gone crazy; ups and downs existed that had never existed before, and for the first time Vyann realized just how ingeniously the engineers who designed the ship had worked. Half the deck, under these conditions, would be impossible to live in: the compartments were built on the ceilings.

Near Vyann, equally silent, were a cluster of Forwards women, some of them clutching children. They watched, many of them, the destruction of their homes.

Scoyt, clad only in a pair of shorts, black as a pot, had fully recovered from his gassing and was now dismantling the entire deck, as earlier he had begun to dismantle Deck 25. On receiving Complain’s message from Vyann, he had flung himself into the work with a ferocity terrible to watch.

His first move had been to have executed without further ado the two women and four men whom Pagwam, with some of the Survival Team, had found wearing the octagonal ring of the Outsiders. Under his insensate direction, as Complain had predicted, the turbulence of Hawl and his fellow brigands had been curbed — or, rather, canalized into less randomly destructive paths. With Gregg, his face and arm stump bandaged, out of the way, Hawl readily took his place; his shrunken face gleamed with pleasure as he worked the heat gun. The rest of Gregg’s mob worked willingly with him, unhampered by the lack of gravity. It was not that they obeyed Hawl, but that his demoniac will was theirs.

What had once been a neat honeycomb of corridor and living accommodation, now, in the light of many torches, looked like a scene from some fantastic everglades, cast in bronze. Throughout the cleared space — cleared though much of the metal was live enough with runaway voltage to make five dead men — girders of tough hull metal, the very skeleton of the ship, jutted solidly in all directions. From them projected icicles of lighter metals and plastics which had melted, dripped and then again solidified. And through all this chaos ran the water from burst mains.

Perhaps of the whole wild scene, the sight of the water was the strangest. Although its momentum carried it forward, bursting out into non-gravity, it showed an inclination to go nowhere and form into globules. But the conflagration started on decks 23 and 24 was now an inferno, which set up on either side of it waves of air within whose eddies the globules whirled and elongated like crazy glass fish.

‘I think we got ’em Giants cornered there, my boys!’ Hawl shouted. ‘There’s blood to fill your supper bowls with this sleep.’ With practised aim he sliced down one more partition. Shouts of excitement went up from the men round him. They worked tirelessly, swooping among the iron carcass.

Vyann could not stay there watching Scoyt. The lines on his face, rendered terrible by torch- and fire-light, had not softened under the breakdown of gravity. They looked now deeper than ever; for Scoyt, this dissection of the body in which he lived was a traumatic experience. This was what his relentless pursuit of a foe had crumbled to, and in the little frenzied Hawl it found external incarnation.

Profoundly saddened, the girl turned away. She glanced about for Tregonnin; he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was fluttering alone in his apartments, a little man who knew truth without being able to convey it. She had to go to Roy Complain; the way she felt at the moment, only his face still wore the mask of humanity. Amid the clamour of demolition, quietly, she saw why she loved Complain; it was because (and this was something both were aware of, though neither spoke of it) Complain had changed, Vyann being both a witness of and a factor in the change. In this hour, many people — Scoyt for one — were changing, sloughing off the ancient moulds of repression even as Complain had done: but whereas they were changing into lower beings, Roy Complain’s metamorphosis lifted him to a higher sphere.

Decks 19 and 18 were packed with people, all ominously waiting for a climax they could but dimly sense. Beyond them, Vyann found the upper levels deserted as she made her way forward. Although the dark sleep-wake was over, the lights of the ship — hitherto as dependable as the sunrise — had failed to come on again; Vyann switched on the torch at her belt and carried her dazer in her hand.

On Deck 15, she paused.

A dim, rosy light filled the corridor, very subtle and soft. It emanated from one of the open trap-doors in the deck. As Vyann looked at the trap, a creature emerged slowly and painfully: a rat. At some time past, its back had been broken; now, a kind of rough sledge, on which its hind legs rested, was lashed across its rump. It pulled itself along with its forelegs, the sledge easing its progress.

Vyann thought, surprising herself: ‘How long before they discover the wheel?’

Just after the rat emerged from the trap, the glow burst into brightness. A pillar of fire leapt out of the hole, fell, and then rose more steadily. Frightened, Vyann skirted it, hurrying on, keeping pace with the rat who, after one glance at her, pressed on without interest. A poignant illusion of mutual torment relieved Vyann’s customary revulsion for the creatures.

Naked fire was not a thing the ship’s company much concerned themselves with. Now, for the first time, Vyann realized it could destroy them utterly — and nobody was doing a thing about it. It was spreading between levels, like a cancerous finger; when they realized its danger, it would be too late. She walked more rapidly, gnawing her ripe lower lip, feeling the deck hot beneath her feet.

Suddenly, the crippled rat, not two yards ahead of her, coughed and lay still.

‘Vyann!’ a voice said behind her.

She wheeled like a startled deer.

Gregg stood there, putting away his dazer. Following her silently down the corridor, he had been unable to resist killing the rat. With his head swathed in bandages, he was hardly recognizable; the remnant of his left arm was also bandaged and strapped across his shirt. In the ruddy dark, he did not make a companionable figure.

Vyann could not repress a shiver of fright at the stealth of his appearance. If she, for any reason, should wish to cry for help, nobody would hear her in this lost corner of the ship.

He came up and touched her arm. She could see his lips among the swathes of bandage.

‘I want to come with you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I followed you through the crowd — I was no use back there like this.’

‘Why did you follow me?’ she asked, withdrawing her arm.

She thought he smiled beneath his lint visor.

‘Something’s gone wrong,’ he said, very quietly. When he saw she did not understand, he added, ‘In the ship, I mean. We’re all for it now. This is Lights Out. You can feel it down in your bones… Let me come with you, Laur; you’re so… Oh, come on, it’s getting hot.’

She moved ahead without speaking. For some reason, her eyes stung with tears; they were, after all, all in the same boat.

While Marapper was making his prostrations over the burnt-out body of Zac Deight, Complain roved round the air lock, gauging its possibilities. If the Giants were coming up from Earth in force, this place had to be defended, and that must be the first thing to worry about. A flush-fitting door, leading to an ante-room in the lock, stood in one wall; Complain pulled it open. It was a mere cubicle from which control could be kept over what came and went in the lock itself. Now, a man lay in it on a rough bunk.

It was Bob Fermour!

He greeted his ex-companion with terror, having heard through an open air valve all that had transpired on the other side of the door. The gentle interrogations of Scoyt and his friends, rapidly interrupted though they had been by the Giants coming to his deliverance, had removed most of the skin from Fermour’s back, as well as a percentage of his moral fibre. He had been left cowering here, while his rescuers returned to Curtis, to wait for a relief ship to come and take him home; now he was convinced he was about to make the Long Journey.

‘Don’t hurt me, Roy!’ he begged. ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know — things you never guessed. Then you won’t want to kill me!’

‘I can’t wait to hear,’ Complain said grimly. ‘But you’re coming straight back to the Council to tell them: I find it dangerous to be the only one who receives these confidences.’

‘Not back into the ship, Roy, please, I beg you. I’ve had enough of it all. I can’t face it again.’

‘Get up!’ Complain said. Seizing Fermour by the wrist, he swung him up and pushed him into the air lock. Then he kicked Marapper gently in his ample, episcopal buttocks.

‘You ought to have grown out of that mumbo jumbo, priest,’ he said. ‘Besides, we’ve no time to waste. We shall have to get Scoyt and Gregg and everyone here to this deck for a mass attack when the Giants arrive. Our only hope, that I can see, is to seize their ship when it comes.’

Red-faced, the priest rose, dusting off his knees and banging dandruff from his shoulders. He manoeuvred so that Complain stood between him and Fermour, avoiding the latter as if he had been a ghost.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said to Complain. ‘Although as a man of peace, I greatly regret all this bloodshed. We must pray to Consciousness that the blood may be theirs, rather than ours.’

Leaving the old councillor to lie where he had fallen, they prodded Fermour out of the lock and back towards the trapdoor in the littered corridor. As they went, a strange noise haunted their ears. At the trap, halting in apprehension, they found the origin of the sound. Beneath their feet, swarming along the inspection way, was a host of rats. Some of them glanced pinkly up at Marapper’s torch; none faltered in their rapid advance towards the bow of the ship. Brown rats, small rats, grey rats, tawny rats, some with belongings strapped to their backs, hurried to the pipe of fear.

‘We can’t get down there!’ Complain said. His stomach twisted at the idea.

The ominous thing was the determined way the swarm moved as if nothing could divert it. It looked as if it might pour on beneath their feet forever.

‘Something really devastating must be happening in the ship!’ Fermour exclaimed. In that ghastly fur river, he drowned his last fear of those who had once been his friends. This united them again.

‘There’s a tool kit in the air lock cubicle,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get it. There should be a saw in it. With that, we can cut our way back to the main part of the ship.’

He ran back the way they had come, returning with a clanking bag. Fumbling it open, he produced an atomic hand saw with a circular blade field; it crumbled away the molecular structure of a wall before their eyes. With a shrill grinding sound, the instrument bit out a shaky circle in the metal. They ducked through it, working their way almost by instinct to a known part of the deck. As if the ship had come to life while they were in the air lock, a faint hammering filled everywhere like an irregular heartbeat; Scoyt’s wreckers were busily at work. The air as they walked grew staler, the dark was hazed with smoke — and a familiar voice was calling for Complain.

In another moment, they rounded a bend at a trot, and there were Vyann and Gregg. The girl threw herself into Complain’s arms.

Hurriedly, he gave her his news. She told him of the devastation being wrought on the twenties decks. Even as she spoke, the lights about them glowed suddenly to great brilliance, then died, even the pilot lights fading completely out. At the same time, the gravity blew; they sprawled uncomfortably in mid-air.

Welling, it seemed, from the lungs of a whale, a groan rattled down the confines of the ship. For the very first time, they perceived the vessel to give a lurch.

‘The ship’s doomed!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Those fools are destroying it! You’ve got nothing to fear from the Giants now — by the time they get here, they’ll be a rescue party, picking desiccated bodies out of a wreck.’

‘You’ll never drag Roger Scoyt from the job he’s doing,’ Vyann said grimly.

‘Holy smother!’ Complain said. ‘This whole situation is just hopeless!’

‘The human predicament apart,’ Marapper said, ‘nothing is hopeless. As I see it, we’d be safest in the Control Room. If I can only control my feet, that’s where I’m going.’

‘Good idea, priest,’ Gregg said. ‘I’ve had enough of burning. It would be the safest place for Vyann, too.’

‘The Control Room!’ Fermour said. ‘Yes, of course…’

Complain said nothing, silently abandoning his plan to take Fermour before the Council; the hour was too late. Nor did there seem, in the circumstances, any hope of repelling the Giants.

Clumsily, with agonizing slowness, the party covered the nine decks which lay between them and the blister housing the ruined controls. At last they hauled themselves panting up the spiral stairs and through the hole Vyann and Complain had made earlier.

‘That’s funny,’ Marapper said. ‘Five of us started out from Quarters to reach this place: finally, three of us have done it together!’

‘Much good may it do us,’ Complain said. ‘I never knew why I followed you, priest.’

‘Born leaders need give no reasons,’ Marapper said modestly.

‘No, this is where we should be,’ Fermour said with excitement. He swung a torch round the vast chamber, taking in the fused mass of panels. ‘Behind this wrecked facade, the controls are still sound. Somewhere here is a device for closing off all inter-deck doors; they’re made of hull metal, and it would be a long while before they’d burn. If I can find that device…’

He waved the atomic saw to finish his meaning, searching already for the board he wanted.

‘The ship must be saved!’ he said, ‘and there is a chance we can do it, if we can only separate the decks.’

‘Damn the ship!’ Marapper said. ‘All we want it to do now is hold together until we can get off it.’

‘You can’t get off it,’ Fermour said. ‘You’d better realize the fact. You must none of you reach Earth. The ship is where you belong and stay. This is a non-stop trip: there is no Journey’s End.’

Complain whirled round on him.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. His voice was so charged with emotion that it sounded flat.

‘It’s not my doing,’ Fermour said hastily, scenting trouble. ‘It’s just that this situation is too formidable for any of you. The ship is in an orbit round Earth, and there it must stay. That was the edict of the World Government which set up the Little Dog authority to control this ship.’

Complain’s gesture was angry, but Vyann’s was supplicatory.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why must the ship stay here? It’s so cruel… We are Earth people. This terrible double journey to Procyon and back — it’s been made, and somehow it now seems we’ve survived it. Shouldn’t — oh, I don’t know what happens on Earth, but shouldn’t people have been glad to have us back, happy, excited…?’

‘When this ship, “Big Dog” — so christened in jocular allusion to the constellation Little Dog for which it set out — was detected in Earth’s telescopes, finally returning from its long journey, everyone on Earth was, as you say — happy, excited, marvelling.’ Fermour paused. This event had taken place before he was born, but the epic had often been retold to him. ‘Signals were sent out to the ship,’ he continued; ‘they were never answered. Yet the ship kept speeding on towards Earth. It seemed inexplicable. We have passed the technological phase of our civilization, but nevertheless factories were speedily built and a fleet of little ships launched towards “Big Dog”. They had to find out what was happening aboard.

‘They matched velocities with this giant vessel, they boarded her. They found — well, they found out about everything; they found that Dark Ages had settled over the whole ship, as the result of an ancient catastrophe.’

‘The Nine Day Ague!’ Vyann breathed.

Fermour nodded, surprised she should know.

‘The ship could not be allowed to go on,’ he said. ‘It would have sped on forever through the galactic night. These controls were discovered as you now see them: ruined — the work, presumably, of some poor madman generations ago. So the Drive was switched off at source, and the ship dragged into an orbit by the little ships which, using gravity for towlines, acted as tugs.’

‘But — why leave us aboard?’ Complain said. ‘Why did you not take us down after the ship was in orbit? As Laur says, it was cruel — inhuman!’

Reluctantly, Fermour shook his head.

‘The inhumanity was in the ship,’ he said. ‘You see, the crew who survived this virus you seem to know about had undergone a slight physiological modification; the new proteins permeating every living cell in the ship increased their metabolic rate. This increase, undetectable at first, has grown with every generation, so that now you are all living at four times the speed you should be.’

He quailed with pity as he told them — but their looks held only disbelief.

‘You’re lying to scare us,’ Gregg said, his eyes glittering amid the wrappings of his face.

‘I’m not,’ Fermour said. ‘Instead of a life expectation for an average human of eighty years, yours is only twenty. The factor does not spread itself evenly over your life: you tend to grow more quickly as children, have a fairly normal adulthood, and then crumble suddenly in old age.’

‘We’d have noticed if this scoundrel scheme were so!’ Marapper howled.

‘No,’ Fermour said. ‘You wouldn’t. Though the signs were all round you, you could not see them, because you have no standards of comparison. For instance, you accepted the fact that one sleep-wake in four was dark. Living at four times the normal rate, naturally four of your days or sleep-wakes only made one ordinary one. When the ship was a going concern — on the voyage out to Procyon — the lights automatically dimmed all over the vessel from midnight to six, partly to give a friendly illusion of night, partly to allow the servicers to work behind scenes, making any necessary repairs. That brief six-hour shift is a whole day to you.’

Now the comprehension was growing on them. It seemed, oddly enough, to soak from the inside to the outside, as if, in some mystical way, the truth had been trapped in them all along. The awful pleasure of making them know the worst — they who had tortured him — filled Fermour. He went on, suddenly keen to make them see how damned they were.

‘That’s why we proper Earthmen call you “dizzies”: you live so fast, it makes us dizzy. But that isn’t all that is wrong with you! Imagine this great ship, still automatically functioning despite the lack of anyone to control it. It supplied everything: except the things which, by its nature, it could not supply, fresh vitamins, fresh air, fresh sunlight. Each of your succeeding generations becomes smaller; Nature survives how she may, and that was her way of doing it, by cutting down on the required materials. Other factors, such as inbreeding, have changed you until — well, it was decided you were virtually a separate race. In fact, you had adapted so well to your environment, it was doubtful if you would be able to survive if transferred down on Earth!’

Now they had it, knowing it right down to the pits of their stomachs. Fermour turned from their sealed faces, ashamed of himself for feeling triumph. Methodically, he resumed prodding about for the particular panel he wanted. He found it, and they were still all standing in choked silence. Using the saw, he began eagerly to work away the seared casing.

‘So we’re not human beings at all…’ Complain exclaimed, as if speaking to himself. ‘That’s what you’re saying. All that we’ve suffered, hoped, done, loved… it’s not been real. We’re just funny little mechanical things, twitching in a frenzy, dolls activated by chemicals… Oh, my God!’

As his voice fell, they all heard the noise. It was the noise they had heard by the personnel lock, the noise of a million rats, flowing irresistibly through the hard honeycomb of the ship.

‘They’re heading here!’ Fermour yelled. ‘They’re coming this way! It’s a dead end. They’ll swamp us! We’ll be torn to pieces!’

Now he had the casing off, tearing it away with his hands, flinging it behind him. Beneath it, severed from their toggles, lay eighty-four double ranks of transistors. Using the side of his saw, Fermour frantically bashed the pairs together. Sparks flew and — the terrible sound of the rodent army cut off abruptly. Every deck was closed from its neighbour; all the inter-deck doors, on every level, had clicked firmly shut, tombing off further communication.

Gasping, Fermour rocked back against the panelling. He had worked the trick just in time. The thought of the horrible death he had so narrowly avoided overcame him, and he was sick on the floor.

‘Look at him, Roy!’ Gregg shouted, pointing his sound hand in scorn. ‘You were wrong about us, Roy! We’re as good as he, or better. He’s scared green…’

He advanced to Fermour, clenching his one good fist; Marapper followed, dragging out a knife.

‘Someone’s got to be sacrificed for all this deadly wrong,’ the priest said, through clenched teeth, ‘and it’s going to be you, Fermour — you’re going to make the Long Journey on behalf of twenty-three generations of suffering! It would be a nice gesture.’

Dropping the saw helplessly, Fermour just stood there without defence. He did not move or speak; it was almost as if he saw the priest’s point of view. Marapper and Gregg came on. Complain and Vyann stood unmoving behind them.

As Marapper’s blade came up, an unexpected clangour filled the dome beneath which they were grouped. Mysteriously, the shutters, closed since the days of Captain Gregory Complain, sprang back to reveal the long windows. Three-quarters of a great sphere all round the five of them was turned in a twinkling into space. Through the hyaline tungsten, the universe breathed in at them; on one side of the ship, the sun burned tall and strong; on the other, Earth and moon were radiant globes.

‘How did that happen?’ Vyann asked, as the clattering echoes died.

They looked round uneasily. Nothing stirred.

Rather sheepishly, Marapper tucked his knife away. The view was too mighty to be stained with blood. Gregg, too, turned away from Fermour. Sunlight washed over them, seeming to deafen them. Fermour at last managed to speak.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said quietly. ‘None of us need to be worried. The ship will come up from Little Dog and put the fire out and kill the rats and tidy things up, and then we’ll open up the decks again and you’ll be able to go on living as before.’

‘Never!’ Vyann said. ‘Some of us have devoted our lives to getting out of this tomb. We’ll die sooner than stay!’

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ Fermour said, almost to himself. ‘We’ve always thought this day might come. It’s not entirely unprepared for — others before you have found out vital secrets, but we’ve always managed to silence them in time. Now… Well, you might be all right on Earth: we have taken some of your babies down there, and they’ve survived, but we’ve always –’

‘We!’ Vyann exclaimed. ‘You keep saying “we”! But you are an Outsider, an ally of the Giants. What relation are you to true Earthmen?’

Fermour laughed without humour.

‘Outsiders and Giants are true Earthmen,’ he said. ‘When “Big Dog” was towed into orbit, we — Earth — fully realized our grave responsibility to you all. Doctors and teachers were your especial need. Holy men were required, to counter the vile irreligion of the Teaching — which, vile though it was, undoubtedly assisted your survival in some measure. But there were snags: the doctors and people could not just creep into the air locks and mingle with you, easy though that was, with the inspection way system and the hydroponic tangles to shelter them. They had to be trained at Little Dog Institute to move and speak as quickly as possible, to sleep in catnaps, to — oh, in short to act like dizzies. And to bear the horrible stench in the ship. And, of course, they had to be abnormally small men, since none of you are above five feet high.

‘Some of these men, performing a dangerous mission, you knew and liked. Doctor Lindsey and Meller, the artist, were both Earthmen stationed in Quarters — Outsiders, but your friends.’

‘… And you,’ Complain said. He made a sweeping gesture before his face; a moth circled there, eluding his hand.

‘I’m an anthropologist,’ Fermour said, ‘although I also tried to help spread the light. There are several of us aboard. This is a unique chance to discover the effects of a closed environment on man; it has taught us more about man and society than we have been able to learn on Earth for centuries.

‘Zac Deight was head of everyone on board whom you would call Outsiders. Our usual term of field work aboard is two years — my time is nearly up, but I can’t stay here now; I shall go back home and write a thesis on being an Outsider. The field work has its personal rewards: it’s arduous, yet not particularly dangerous, unless one runs against efficient people like Scoyt. Zac Deight loved dizzies — loved you. He stayed in the ship long beyond his term, to try and soften conditions and lead Forwards’ thought back into more normal channels — in which he was very successful, as you can see if you compare conditions in Forwards with conditions in a Deadways tribe like Quarters.

‘He was a wonderful man, Zac Deight, a humanist like Schweitzer in the twentieth or Turnball in the twenty-first century. Perhaps I shall amass his biography when I’ve finished my thesis.’

Discomfort rose in Complain at this, to recall how he and Marapper had shot down the old councillor without compunction.

‘I suppose, then, that Giants are just big humans?’ he said, deflecting the subject of conversation.

‘They’re just normal-size humans,’ Fermour said. ‘Six-footers and up. They did not have to be picked for small stature, since they were never meant to be seen by you, unlike Outsiders; they were the maintenance crew who came aboard when the ship was in orbit and began, secretly, to make the place more suitable and comfortable for you to live in. They sealed off these controls, in case anybody finding them should start wondering about things; for although we always tried to foster in you the knowledge that you are in a ship — in case a day ever came when you might be able to leave it — the maintenance crews were always careful to destroy any direct evidence which might, by inducing you to investigate on your own account, make their job more dangerous.

‘Mainly, however, their work was constructive. They repaired water and air ducts — you’ll remember, Roy, how you caught Jack Randall and Jock Andrews repairing a flood in the swimming bath. They killed off a lot of rats — but the rats were cunning; they and several other species of creature have changed since leaving Procyon V. Now we’ve got most of them trapped on Deck 2, we may be able to exterminate them en masse.

‘The rings we and what you call the “Giants” wear are replicas of the same ring-key the original maintenance crews wore when the ship was a going concern. They, and the inspection ways to which they give egress, have made life aboard with you possible. It means we can have — and occasionally slip away to — a secret H.Q. on the ship, with food and baths laid on there. That’s where Curtis is probably dying by now, unless closing the deck doors saved him.

‘Curtis is not the kind to make a success of his job; he’s too nervy. Under him, faults have crept in and discipline lapsed. The poor fellow Gregg speared — who had the laser which has caused so much damage — was working in Deadways alone, instead of being accompanied, as the rules stipulate. That was one of Curtis’s mistakes. All the same, I hope he’s safe.’

‘So you were all just taking care of us! You didn’t any of you want to scare us, eh?’ Gregg asked.

‘Of course not,’ Fermour replied. ‘Our orders are strictly not to kill a dizzy; none of us ever carry a lethal weapon. The legend that Outsiders were spontaneously generated in the muck of the ponics was purely a dizzy superstition. We did nothing to alarm, everything to help.’

Gregg laughed curtly.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Just a bunch of wet nurses for us poor dolts, eh? It never occurred to you, you big-hearted bastards, that while you cosseted and studied us we might be going through hell? Look at me! Look at my mate Hawl! Look at half the poor devils I had under me! And look at the ones so deformed we put ’em out of their misery when we came across them in Deadways! Let’s see, seven off twenty-three… Yes, you let sixteen generations live and die here, as near as this to Earth, suffering the tortures we suffered, and you think you deserve a medal for it! Give me that knife, Marapper — I want a peep at the colour of this little bloody hero’s giblets.’

‘You’ve got it wrong!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Complain, you tell him! I’ve explained about the speed-up of your lives. Your generations are so brief that twenty of them had passed before “Big Dog” was first boarded and dragged into orbit. They’re studying the main problem down in the laboratories of Little Dog all the while, that I swear to you. At any time now, they may find a chemical agent which can be injected into you to break down the alien peptic chains in your cells. Then you’d be free. Even now –’

He broke off suddenly, staring.

They followed his gaze. Even Gregg looked round. Something like smoke, filtering out into the blinding sunshine, rose from a gash in one of the wrecked panels.

‘Fire!’ Fermour said.

‘Rubbish!’ Complain said. He pushed himself towards the growing cloud. It was composed of moths, thousands of them. They flew high into the dome, circling towards the unexpected sun. Behind the first phalanx of small ones came larger ones, struggling to get out of the hole in the panel. Their endless squadrons, droning ahead of their rodent allies, had managed to reach the spaces behind the control board before the rats gained this deck. They poured forth in increasing numbers. Marapper pulled out his dazer and downed them as they emerged.

A bemused sensation furred over all their brains, half sentient ghost thoughts emanating from the mutated swarm. Dazedly, Marapper ceased firing, and the moths poured out again. High voltage crackled behind the panels, where other hordes of moths jammed naked connections, causing short circuits.

‘Can they do any real damage?’ Vyann asked Complain.

He shook his head uneasily, to show he did not know, fighting away the feeling of having a skull stuffed with muslin.

‘Here comes the ship!’ Fermour said relievedly, pointing into the gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light seemed hardly to move towards them.

Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, ‘Big Dog’. Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves. The moths, it suddenly occurred to her, must accidentally have activated the shutters in their struggle behind the controls. Now the moths whirred about them, uniformly radiating hope.

Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like toothache; she had to look away.

‘To think they’ll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us back away from the sun…’ she said.

‘They won’t… they can’t,’ Complain said. ‘Fermour’s only a fool: he doesn’t know. When these others come, Laur, they’ll understand we’ve earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth. Obviously they’re not cruel or they’d never have taken so much trouble over us. They’ll see we’d rather die there than live here.’

A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of plastic panelling blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from danger; the priest followed them more slowly — his cloak had been blown over his head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live ones fluttered. Before too long, the control room would be packed with moths. With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the middle bowels of the ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble with it.

Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries, ‘Big Dog’ was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once mighty and pathetic.

‘It’s the Emergency Stop!’ Fermour shouted. His voice seemed far away. ‘The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The ship’s splitting into its component decks!’

They could see it all. The fissures on that noble arch of back were swelling into canyons. Then the canyons were gulfs of space. Then there was no longer a ship: only eighty-four great pennies, becoming smaller, spinning away from one another, falling forever along an invisible pathway. And each penny was a deck, and each deck was now a world of its own, and each deck, with its random burden of men, animals or ponics sailed away serenely round Earth, buoyant as a cork in a fathomless sea.

This was a break there could be no mending.

‘Now they’ll have no alternative but to take us back to Earth,’ Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried, woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be born, she thought, smiling into Complain’s awakened face. He was her sort; neither of them had ever been really sure of what they wanted: so they would be most likely to find it.