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.