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
‘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
