Non-Stop

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!’