Non-Stop

With a quiet word to the Giants above, he started the motor. Again the grey roof flowed overhead, punctuated by crisscrossing pipe, wire and tube.

At length they stopped. Fumbling on the roof, the Giant pressed his fingers to it, and a square opened above them. Complain was hauled out of the hole, carried a few yards, bundled through a door, and dropped. He was back in Deadways: its smell to a hunter was unmistakeable. The Giant hovered over him wordlessly, a shadow in shadows, and then vanished.

The darkness of the dim sleep-wake embraced Complain like a mother’s arms. He was back home, among dangers he was trained to face. He slept.

Phantom legions of rats swarmed over him, pinning him down. The rabbit came; it climbed into his head and slithered down the long warrens of his brain.

Complain woke, groaning, humiliated by the beastliness of his dream. It was still dark. The rigidity in his limbs, induced by the gas pellet, had relaxed, his lungs were clear. Carefully, he stood up.

Shielding his torch till it gave the barest whisper of light, Complain moved to the door and looked out at blackness. As far as he could see, a gulf stretched infinitely before him. He slid out, feeling along to the right, and found a row of doors. Using the light again, he found damp, bare tile underfoot. Then he knew where he was; a hollowness in his ear reinforced the certainty. The Giant had brought him back to what Roffery had called the sea.

Getting his bearings, Complain flashed the light cautiously. The sea itself had gone. He walked to the edge of the pit into which Roffery had fallen. It was empty, all but dry. Roffery had gone. The walls of the pit glinted with festoons of rust, blood-coloured; in the warm air, the floor of the pit was drying rapidly.

Complain turned and walked from the chamber, minding not to wake the haggard echoes. He headed back to Marapper’s camp. The ground still squelched lightly underfoot, holding its moisture. He brushed gently by the sagging muck of last season’s ponics, and came to the camp door. He whistled eagerly, wondering who would be on guard: Marapper? Wantage? Fermour? Almost lovingly, he thought of them, reversing the old Quarters’ adage to whisper to himself: ‘Better the devils you know than the ones you don’t.’

His signal went unanswered. Holding himself tense, he pushed into the room. It was empty. They had moved on. Complain was alone in Deadways.

Self-control snapped then; he had gone through too much. Giants, rats, rabbits, he could bear — but not the scabrous solitudes of Deadways. He rioted round the room, flinging up the splintered wood, kicking, cursing, out into the corridor, roaring, swearing, tearing a way through the vegetable mash, howling, blaspheming.

A body cannoned into him from behind. Complain sprawled in the tangle, fighting insanely to turn and tackle his assailant. A hand clamped itself unshakeably over his mouth.

‘Shut up, you drab-spawned he-hag!’ a voice snarled in his ear.

He ceased struggling. A light was turned on to him and three figures hunched over him.

‘I — I thought I’d lost you!’ he said. Suddenly, he began to cry. Reaction turned him into a child again. His shoulders heaved, the tears poured down his cheeks.

Marapper smacked him efficiently across the face.

IV

They travelled. Grimly, cutting, pushing, they worked through the ponics; circumspectly, they moved through dark regions where no lights burned and no ponics grew. They passed through badly plundered areas, whose doors were broken, whose corridors were piled high with wreckage. Such life as they met was timid, eluding them where possible; but few creatures lived here — a rogue goat, a crazed hermit, a pathetic band of sub-men who fled when Wantage clapped his hands. This was Deadways, and the emptiness held unrecorded eras of silence. Quarters was left far behind the travellers, and forgotten. Even their nebulous destination was forgotten, for the present, with its ceaseless call upon their physical reserves, required all their attention.

Finding the subsidiary connections between decks was not always easy, even with the help of Marapper’s plan. Liftshafts were often blocked, levels frequently proved dead ends. But they gradually moved forward; the fifties decks were passed, then the forties, and so they came, on the eighth wake after leaving Quarters, to Deck 29.

By now, Roy Complain had begun to believe in the Ship theory. The reorientation had been insensible but thorough. To this, the intelligent rats had greatly contributed. When Complain had told his companions of his capture by the Giants, he had omitted the rat incident; something fantastic about it, he knew instinctively, would have defied his powers of description and awoken Marapper’s and Wantage’s derision; but he now found his thoughts turning frequently to those fearsome creatures. He saw a parallel between the lives of the rats and the human lives emphasized in their man-like conduct of ill-treating a fellow creature, the rabbit. The rats survived where they could, giving no thought to the nature of their surroundings; Complain could only say the same of himself until now.

Marapper had listened to the tale of the Giants intently, commenting little. Once he said, ‘Then do they know where the Captain is?’

He was particularly pressing for full details of what the Giants had said to each other. He repeated the names ‘Curtis’ and ‘Randall’ several times, as if muttering a spell.

‘Who was this little dog they went to speak to?’ he asked.

‘I think it was a name,’ Complain said. ‘Not a real little dog.’

‘A name of what?’

‘I don’t know. I tell you I was half-conscious.’ Indeed the more he thought, the less clear he was as to what exactly had been said. Even at the time, the episode had been sufficiently outside his normal experience to render it half incredible to him.

‘Was it another Giant’s name, do you think, or a thing’s name?’ the priest pressed, tugging at the lobe of his ear, as if to extract the facts that way.

‘I don’t Know, Marapper. I can’t remember. They just said they were going to talk to “little dog” — I think.’

At Marapper’s insistence, the party of four inspected the hall marked ‘Swimming Pool’, where the sea had been. It had completely dried up now. There was no sign of Roffery, which was baffling, considering that one of the Giants had said that the valuer would recover from the gas pellet as Complain had done. They searched and called, but Roffery did not appear.

‘His moustache will be hanging over a mutant’s bunk by now,’ Wantage said. ‘Let’s get a move on!’

They could find no hatch which might have led to the Giants’ room. The steel lid covering the inspection pit where Complain and Roffery had first seen the two Giants was as secure as if it had never opened. The priest shot Complain a sceptical glance, and there the matter was left. Taking Wantage’s advice, they moved on.

The whole incident lowered Complain’s stock considerably. Wantage, quick to seize advantage, became undisputed second-in-command. He followed Marapper, and Fermour and Complain followed him. At least it made for peace in the ranks, and outward accord.

If, during the periods of intent silence when they pushed along the everlasting rings of deck, Complain changed into someone more thoughtful and self-sufficient, the priest’s nature also changed. His volubility had gone, and the vitality from which it sprang. At last he realized the true magnitude of the task he had set himself, and was forced to put his whole will to enduring.

‘Been trouble here — old trouble,’ he said at one place in their trek, leaning against the wall and looking ahead into the middle level of Deck 29. The others paused with him. The tangles stretched for only a few yards in front of them, then began the darkness in which they could not grow. The cause of the light failure was obvious: ancient weapons, such as Quarters did not possess, had blasted holes in the roof and walls of the corridor. A heavy cabinet of some kind protruded through the roof, and the nearby doors had been buckled out of their sockets. For