The Watch Below (19 page)

". . . Can you hear me, sir?" the female was saying worriedly. "They know
something is going on. I repeat, they are sure that it is an attack, but
are not yet certain of the exact locality. Flagship to Captain Deslann.
The food ship has now broken contact, but they know something is going on."
"Got it," said Deslann. "You did very well, Hayellin. Stay on that
wavelength, it's clearer . . ."
Suddenly Deslann could not breathe. The water in his suit was like thick,
warm mud and his vision was going. Desperately he tore off the plates
of his suit covering his gills and wriggled furiously to expel the foul
water, but the fresh water which came in was so hot that he grunted in
agony. On the point of losing consciousness he grabbed two pieces of
ice which were hanging nearby and pressed them against his gills. When
he breathed slowly the water passing around the ice was cooled enough
not to scald his lungs. Then as soon as he could speak again he detailed
one of his party to stand by the communicator and swam quickly through
the inner seal.
Inside the lock a large hemisphere had been melted out of the solid ice
filling the main hold of the food ship, a hemisphere which looked tiny
only because the hold was so vast. It was expanding slowly as his party
attacked the icy walls with their heat beams and it was filled with water
close to boiling in some places while a short distance further on the
water was icy cold. And there were chunks of ice, some of them as big as
Deslann, which hung like invisible rocks in his path. The rear half of
one of the food animals filling the hold, a thick, torpedo shape ending
in a broad, razor-edged tail, projected from the ice wall on one side,
and the head and dorsal of another animal from the other. The expression
on its face, frozen there when it and its companions in the hold had
been cooled so many generations ago, made Deslann want suddenly to laugh.
With all the movement inside the hemisphere, the temperature of the water
would find a more comfortable level and the blocks of ice would shrink,
but the food animals might not survive their partial warm-up -- they were
tough, but their revival required a sudden rise in temperature together
with a carefully timed dose of the radiation which would shock their
hearts and nervous systems back into life. But it was not, Deslann told
himself, as if these two would be the only beasts rendered permanently
rather than temporarily dead.
Peering through the ice at the twisted, frozen bodies he could see
several whose edible parts were missing. The partly eaten bodies were
grouped together and were surrounded by a pinkish fog, and a narrow band
of fog ran through the center of the hold towards the bow. He knew from
intelligence gathered by the second expedition that the enemy did not have
heat beams but, in melting their tunnels, used chemical methods which
left a pinkish residue on the ice walls. Deslann gave orders quickly,
and with their gill openings packed with chips of ice they began melting
their way through to the enemy tunnel.
And in the tunnel they found the water suddenly blackened with mud bombs
and out of the murk there came darting a stream of silvery, metal fish.
The fish moved fairly slowly since they were being fired from spring-loaded
guns at extreme range, but when they met their target, no matter how gently,
a charge at the rear of the dart exploded, driving the barb deeply into
the fabric of the spacesuits and the flesh beneath. Deslann, who was in
the lead, blundered into a chunk of ice and began pushing it ahead of
him as a shield, but the people following him were not so lucky. A lot
of the metal darts were slipping past his shield and the tunnel throbbed
with the coughs and grunts of the wounded and with the pounding of their
suddenly uncontrollable bodies against the walls and each other as the
coating on the metal barbs attacked their nervous systems.
But the blackness around him was beginning to lighten, and the tunnel
was opening out into the main living pool. Suddenly the enemy, males,
females, and children, were all around them, easy targets for their own
dart guns despite the nursery nets and decorative vegetation scattered
about the pool. Their darts had been treated by the flagship's healers
with a fast-acting anaesthetic -- they were not, after all, on a mission
of extermination -- and the enemy did not have the protection of spacesuits.
But the food-ship people did not know that the darts striking them were
nonlethal and fought bitterly with guns, lances, and even teeth. The numbers
of dead and dying on both sides continued to. rise steadily, because
Deslann's people had taken too much punishment and were killing mad.
Instead of anaesthetic darts they were beginning to use their heat beams.
"If you have to kill them," the captain shouted urgently, "kill females!"
Then finally it was all over. The control room and associated compartments,
the secondary pools and their connecting tunnels were searched and cleared
of all sentient Unthan life. The dead were left to drift in water that was
already cooling into the ice which would hold them immobile like the other
beasts thronging the ship. The survivors, who were mainly children, had
been moved to the flagship and only Deslann Five and the enemy captain
were left.
"We were telling you the truth," Deslann said angrily as he, too,
left the food ship, pushing the spacesuited and badly injured body of
Captain Hellseggorn before him. "Although we could not risk telling
you all of it, your minds back there were closed, you were no longer
completely civilized, and we did not know how you might react. But we
did not want your meat supply alone, and we did desperately want to be
reunited with you.
"Surely you must have noticed," he went on, "that the expedition, with
the exception of myself, was made up entirely of females. The reason
for that is because the number of males born to us on the flagship has
fallen to one in twenty, and the majority of those have been sterile.
"So we needed you, badly," Deslann the Fifth went on furiously, "and
we did not want you dead. We were not intending to kill any of you,
except by accident, and we were relying on surprise. From the previous
expedition we learned that your children, unlike ours, were healthy and
more evenly balanced as to sex. We think your diet had something to do
with that. But we badly need those children.
"Without them there would be no future, no crew to man the flagship and
guide the fleet during the most important stage of the journey. Surely
you see that."
But Captain Hellseggorn was not seeing anything. During the last few
minutes of the fighting he had swum through a patch of water freshly
boiled by a heat beam and his eyes, like the mind behind them, were
permanently closed in blindness. He could not see the two great ships
which hung in the darkness ahead and behind him, or the single star which
blazed like a beacon against a backdrop of fainter suns. He could not
see and would not believe that the journey's end was so very, very near.
XIX
In the stern section of Gulf Trader the settlement of the Young People did
not prosper well after the third generation. First there was the serious
blow to their morale caused by the ports in Richard's Rooms becoming
covered with a thin green scum which rendered them translucent rather
than transparent and finally completely opaque. They could no longer
look out at the sandy sea bed or the rocks or at the wrinkled, silvery
surface far above them, so that all these things became secondhand facts,
or part of the Game, and took the first step toward becoming fiction. The
second major misfortune was that the three young couples were suffering,
as was everyone else in the ship, from vitamin deficiencies affecting
their hair among other things. The men were prematurely bald and two of
the women's hair had gone gray in patches and was falling out. But the
worst misfortune; a medical disaster in the doctor's opinion, was that
the female Young People were all expecting babies.
In the ordinary way a child born into the world of the ship could expect
to receive hair both from its mother's head and its father's head and chin.
The early uniforms and sacking had long since been worn to tatters and
even the tatters had rotted away in the increasingly damp atmosphere,
so that clothing made from human hair was all that an infant had to keep
it warm between birth and the age when it gained enough intelligence and
physical control to wear the stiffer vegetable fibers. Plant fibers were
useful for bedding and little else, and even the clothing made from a
mixture of plant and hair came apart or wore out too easily. Hair was
warm, flexible, and easily worked, and its only disadvantage was that
it took so long to grow.
For many generations it had been the custom to cut hair off at the roots,
regardless of age or sex, as soon as it reached a useful length. The only
exceptions were in the cases of young people close to maturity, who were
allowed to retain their hair since they could be expected to marry within
a few years and would want their first-born to be warmly clothed.
A male beard, no matter how bushy or luxuriant, could supply only a
small fraction of the quantity grown on a healthy head. But the hair
of the Young People couples, not to mention their general health, left
much to be desired in the doctor's opinion, and this deficiency caused
such deep concern among them that their Game suffered and for days at
a stretch almost died from the psychological poison of worry. That was
one of the reasons why the doctor offered to help out by donating his
own sparse growth when next it became due for cutting.
Dr. James Eichlan Wallis was nineteen years old and suffered from a badly
twisted spine (his mother, an epileptic, had had several falls during the
later stages of her pregnancy) and a visually, and tactually repulsive
skin condition. His offer, as he knew it would be, despite his many
reassurances that the condition was not transmissible, allowed him to take
advantage of their resulting feelings of awkwardness over the refusal:
by pressing his arguments for having them forget their senseless, and
by now almost nonexistent, differences with the Seniors for'rard.
Except for the very infrequent visits of the elected commander aft for
the purpose of marriage and the five-yearly inspection and the times
when the Young People went amidships to serve in absolute silence on the
generator, the only contact between the two groups was the doctor. He
was able to tell them, therefore, of the greater comfort of the Senior
living quarters, of the extra warmth and of the reserves of clothing
available in an emergency -- which could make all the difference to a
patient in shock. He admitted that the improvement in conditions would
be fractional, but important nonetheless, and at times his arguments
were so vehement that for days on end the Young People refused to talk
to him. Even the Seniors displayed toward him a certain coolness due to
some of his arguments which had been loud enough to carry the length of
the ship, and to the things he had said which were not intended to be
heard by both sides. The one argument he could not use, partly because
he was the doctor and partly because the change in living quarters was
unlikely to affect the result, was to tell the Young People females the
truth about their chances of surviving their approaching confinements.
He was disappointed, but not surprised, when his arguments got him
precisely nowhere.
Until . . .
The first girl died in childbirth, not surprisingly considering her history
of repeated bouts of rheumatic fever as a child and the condition in which
it had left her heart. Her baby, a girl, gave a satisfactory cry on being
smacked, but a few seconds later became cyanosed and died. A few days
later the father died from a fractured skull sustained when he fell from
Richard's Rooms to the floor of Number Twelve. He had somehow managed
to avoid the ladder on his way down, and the indications were that he
had not put his arms out to help break his fall.
Two Senior women arrived bringing a rusty tin of powdered milk, nearly two
pounds of hair, and unlimited amounts of sympathy and help. Their action
in coming aft was tantamount to mutiny, but they explained that they could
not bear to listen to the harrowing details of life in the Young People's
section which the doctor kept giving them. And so, despite a history in
all respects the same as her predecessor, the second mother managed to
cling to life, and so did her baby son. The third girl, whose physical
condition was the worst of all, did not survive, although her daughter
did. Coincidentally, the baby's father had an accident on the generator
a few days later -- a real rather than a deliberate accident, this time.
The gearing had jammed just as he had worked up to full speed and he was
pressing down hard on the left pedal. Foot pressure snapped the pedal
in half and the raw edge tore an eight-inch gash in his leg. The doctor
sutured with hair and bound it tightly with leaves and plant fiber,
which was the best he could do, but the man was a bleeder and there was
never any hope for him.
It was at this point that the Young People became reabsorbed into the
Seniors. At first there was a certain awkwardness -- a feeling that the
Seniors were simply performing a duty toward the surviving Young People,
much as a family will look after the newly orphaned children of a distant
and not very well-liked relative -- but gradually this awkwardness
disappeared. The newcomers were eagerly absorbing material which had
been allowed to drop from the Young People's Game and in turn they
were bringing three generations of fresh, new memories to the Seniors'
Game. Some of this data included dialogue on the planning, preparation,
and execution of four separate escape attempts, and they were without
doubt the most stirring passages in the whole history of the submerged
ship. It was as if some heavy, invisible load had been lifted from them
by the simple fact of their being reunited. The whole, as the trite old
saying had it, really was greater than the sum of its parts.