Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [85]
‘I really think we ought to hold a full Council meeting before we do anything as drastic as this, Master Scoyt!’ Councillor Ruskin said plaintively, surveying the ruin of the cell.
‘We’ve done nothing but hold Council meetings for years,’ Scoyt said. ‘Now we’re going to act.’
He ran into the corridor and bellowed furiously, producing in very short time a dozen armed men and a ladder.
Complain, who felt he had more experience of this kind of thing than the others, went to fetch a bucket of water from the nearby guards’ quarters, flinging it up over the tortured metal to cool it. In the ensuing cloud of steam, Scoyt thrust the ladder into place and climbed up with his dazer ready. One by one, as quickly as possible, the others followed, Vyann keeping close to Complain. Soon the whole party stood in the strange room above the cell.
It was overwhelmingly hot; the air was hard to breathe. Their torches soon picked out the reason for the blocked grille and the collapsed inspection way below their feet: the floor of this chamber had undergone a terrific denting in some long-past explosion. A machine – perhaps left untended in the time of the Nine Day Ague, Complain thought – had blown up, ruining every article and wall in the place. A staggering quantity of splintered glass and silicone was scattered all over the floor. The walls were pitted with shrapnel. But there was not a trace of a Giant.
‘Come on!’ Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the wreckage towards one of two doors. ‘Let’s not waste time here.’
The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the laser and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their torch beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.
‘No sign of life . . .’ Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of unease.
They stood in a side corridor, sealed off from the rest of the ship, entombed, scattering their torchlight about convulsively. It was so achingly hot they could hardly see over their cheek bones.
One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice was stencilled. Crowding together, they shuffled to read what it said:
DUTYMEN ONLY CARGO HATCH – AIR LOCK
DANGER!
A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN UNTIL YOU GET THE SIGNAL’. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.
‘What are you doing – waiting to get a signal?’ Hawl grated at them. ‘Melt the door down, Captain!’
‘Wait!’ Scoyt said. ‘We ought to be careful here. What’s an air lock, I’d like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks, but what’s an air lock?’
‘Never mind what it is. Melt it down!’ Hawl repeated, waggling his grotesque head. ‘It’s your lousy ship, Captain – make yourself at home!’
Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.
‘Must be special metal,’ he said.
One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone laughed sharply at the slackening of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed. They were free to move into the cargo air lock.
Instead of moving, they stood pixilated by a stream of light which beat remorselessly upon them. The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window looking into space.
This was not the meagre pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained rooted in the entrance.
Beyond the window,