Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [87]
Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back. Gregg’s two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along the human chain, and demolition continued.
By now, the corridors of decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of trap-doors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.
‘The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable,’ Councillor Tregonnin protested. ‘This is destroying for destroying’s sake.’
He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin were present. Pagwam and other officers of the Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac Deight were missing.
By the messengers which had been despatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt had sent back word that he was ‘too busy’. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin’s request to fetch up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight’s sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor – but might there not be other traitors here, whom it would be wiser not to warn?
‘The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,’ Hawl shouted. ‘That’s obvious enough; why make an issue of it?’
‘You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled apart!’ Councillor Dupont protested.
‘It would get rid of the rats, anyway,’ Hawl said, and cackled with laughter.
Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the members of the Council; neither side liked the other’s manners. The meeting was disorganized for another reason: nobody could decide whether they wanted most to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange planet.
At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the situation.
‘What it amounts to’, he said, ‘is this. Scoyt’s policy can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be captured but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship down on to the surface of this planet.’
There was a general murmur of agreement at this.
‘Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge,’ Billyoe said, ‘since they built the ship in the first place.’
‘Then let’s get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some support,’ Gregg said, standing up.
‘There is just one other thing I would like to say before you go,’ Tregonnin said, ‘and that is, that our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth.’
The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.
Complain’s voice cut through the uproar.
‘The planet is not Earth!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We must be far away from Earth – twenty-three generations have passed on this ship: Earth should have been reached in seven!’
He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful and demanding.
He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation exactly as it was; they must be told everything – about the ruined controls, about Captain Gregory Complain’s journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told everything – the problem had grown far too urgent for any one man to cope with it. But before he could utter another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood