Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [71]
‘Phoned Laboratories. Research promise (as they have before) to produce a cure for our plague tomorrow; unfortunately most of the scientists there are down with the Ague, and a woman called Besti is trying to run things.
‘21.xii.2221. I have left the Control Room – perhaps for good. The shutters have been closed against the ghastly stars. Gloom lies thick over the ship. Over half our population has the Nine Day Ague; out of sixty-six who have completed the full cycle, forty-six have died. The percentage of deaths is dropping daily, but the survivors seem comatose. Sheila Pesoli, for instance, hardly stirs.
‘Managing any sort of organization becomes increasingly hard. Contact with further parts of the ship is virtually lost, vital cable complexes having been destroyed. Everywhere, groups of men and women huddle together, waiting. Licentiousness vies with apathy for upper hand. I have visions of us all dying, this dreadful tomb speeding on perhaps for millennia until it is captured by a sun’s gravity.
‘This pessimism is weakness: even Yvonne cannot cheer me.
‘Research has now identified the causal virus; somehow that seems of small importance. The knowledge comes too late. For what it is worth, here are their findings. Before leaving the new planet, we completely rewatered. All stocks of water aboard were evacuated into orbit, and fresh supplies ferried up. The automatic processes which claim moisture from the air and feed it back into the hull tanks have always been efficient; but naturally such water, used over and over, had become – to use a mild word – insipid.
‘The new water, ferried up from the streams of Procyon V, tasted good. It had, of course, been tested for microscopic life and filtered; but perhaps we were not as thorough as we should have been – scientific method has naturally stagnated over the generations. However, apportioning blame is irrelevent in our present extremity. In simple terms, viral proteins were suspended in the water in molecular solutions, and so slipped through our filters.
‘June Besti, in Research, a bright and conceited young thing whose hyper-agoraphobia rendered her unable to join her husband on Procyon V, explained the whole chain of events to me in words of one syllable. Proteins are complex condensation forms of amino acids; amino acids are the basics, and link together to form proteins in peptic chains. Though the known amino acids number only twenty-five, the combinations of proteins they can form is infinite; unfortunately a twenty-sixth amino acid turned up in the water from Procyon V. It served as a vector for the fatal virus.
‘In the tanks, the proteins soon hydrolyzed back into their constituents, as doubtless they would have done on the planet. Meanwhile, the ship’s quota of human beings, livestock and plants absorb many gallons of water per day; their systems build up the amino acids back into proteins, which are transferred to the body cells, where they are used as fuel and, in the combustive processes of metabolism, dissolved back into aminos again. That’s the usual way it happens.
‘The twenty-sixth amino acid disrupts this sequence. It combines into too complex a protein for any system – vegetable or animal – to handle. This is the point at which rigidity of the limbs sets in and the virus proliferates. As Payne explained, the denser peptic linkage may partially be due to the heavier gravity of New Earth; we know very little about the sustained effects of gravity on viral development or free-building molecules.
‘By now, the settlement on the new world must be in as sad a state as we. At least they have the privilege