Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [35]
When he appeared again, Roffery had found a footing, and stood chest-deep in the water. Panting and cursing, he pushed forward to seize Complain’s hand. At the same time, the trapdoor was flung open. The Giants were coming out. As Complain whirled round, he was aware of Roffery pausing to grab at his dazer, which would not be affected by damp, and of a pattern of crazy light rippling on the ceiling high above them. Without aiming, he fired his own dazer at a head emerging from the vault. The daze went wide. The Giant launched himself at them, and Complain dropped his weapon in panic. As he bent to scrabble for it in the shallow water, Roffery fired over his stooped back. His aim was better than Complain’s.
The Giant staggered and fell with a splash which roused the echoes. As far as Complain could remember afterwards, the monster had been unarmed.
The second Giant was armed. Seeing the fate of his companion, he crouched on the ladder, shielded by the curb, and fired twice. The first shot got Roffery in the face. Without a sound, he slipped beneath the water.
Complain dived flat, kicking up spray, but he was an easy target for the marksman. His temple stopped the second shot.
Limply, he slumped into the water, face down.
The Giant climbed out of the pit and came grimly towards him.
III
At the centre of the human metabolism is the will to live. So delicate is this mechanism that some untoward experience early in life can implant within it the opposite impulse, the will to die. The two drives lie quietly side by side, and a man may pass his days unaware of their existence; then some violent crisis faces him and, stripped momentarily of his superficial characteristics, his fatal duality is bare before him; and he must stop to wrestle with the flaw within before he can fight the external foe.
It was so with Complain. After oblivion, came only the frantic desire to retreat back into unconsciousness. But unconsciousness had rejected him, and the prompting soon came that he must struggle to escape from whatever predicament he was in. Then again, he felt no urge to escape, only the desire to submit and fade back into nothing. Insistently, however, life returned.
He opened his eyes for a moment. He was lying on his back in semi-darkness. A grey roof of some kind was only a few inches above his head. It was flowing backwards, or he was moving forwards: he could not tell which, and closed his eyes again. A steady increase in bodily sensation told him his ankles and wrists were lashed together.
His head ached, and a foul smell pervaded his lungs, making breathing an agony. He realized the Giant had shot him with some kind of gas pellet, instantly effective but ultimately, perhaps, innocuous.
Again he opened his eyes. The roof still seemed to be travelling backwards, but he felt a steady tremor through his body, telling him he was on some kind of moving vehicle. Even as he looked, the movement stopped. He saw a Giant loom beside him, presumably the one who had shot and captured him. Through half-closed eyes, Complain saw the immense creature was on hands and knees in this low place. Feeling on the roof, he now knuckled some kind of switch, and a section of the roof swung upwards.
From above came light and the sound of deep voices. Complain was later to recognize this slow, heavy tone as the typical manner of speech of the Giants. Before he had time to prepare for it, he was seized and dragged off the conveyance and passed effortlessly up through the opening.