Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [86]
Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.
Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright blind blue as a new-born kitten’s eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm’s length. It scintillated into dazzling white at its centre, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.
Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the miracle of it. They were struck dumb, deaf and dizzy by its sublimity.
At last it was Vyann who spoke.
‘Oh, Roy darling,’ she whispered. ‘We have arrived somewhere, after all! There’s still a hope for us, there’s still some sort of a hope.’
Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something was he had wanted all his life.
It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was just to see Laur’s face – by sunlight.
III
Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to every man, woman and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident was a mere irrelevance, almost a set-back in the priority task of hunting down the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a cat-nap and some food, he proceeded to put into action.
The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going entirely to dismantle Deck 25.
Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it, and you would have a perfect no-man’s-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a hunt could be started down all the inspection ways and the Giants would be unable to escape.
Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt’s aid, willing to do anything they could to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain, sweating warriors, many of them Gregg’s men, who had experience of such tasks, attacked the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the clearance men, looting, gutting and filleting the place.
And so as soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat gun, blazing round the sides of the walls till the walls came tumbling down; they were carted off directly they were cool enough to touch. The laser did not melt the plastic which actually divided deck from deck – that metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air lock doors were built, something extra tough – but everything else fell away before it.
Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room marked ‘Laundry’. Splitting open a boiler, two of Gregg’s men revealed a crazy little maze of rat buildings, a rodent village. Different levels and flights of a bewildering complexity of design had been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth. There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters, rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and there were the rats, in nurseries and studs and armouries and slaughter houses. As Scoyt thrust the heat gun into the miniature city