Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [95]
Resignedly, his face pale, Zac Deight started to call, all too aware of the dazer a yard from his face. In a moment, a clear voice from the plastic box said: ‘Hullo, Big Dog. Little Dog here, receiving you loud and clear. Back.’
‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ Zac Deight said, then stopped. He painfully cleared his throat. The sweat coursed down his forehead. As he paused, Complain’s weapon jerked under his nose, and he began again, staring momentarily out at the sun in anguish. ‘Hullo, Little Dog,’ he said. ‘Will you please send up a ship to us at once – the dizzies are loose! Help! Help! The dizzies are loose! Come armed! The dizzies – aaargh! . . .’
He took Complain’s blast in the teeth, Marapper’s in the small of his back. He crumpled over, the radio chattering as it fell with him. He did not even twitch. He was dead before he hit the deck. Marapper seized the instrument up from the floor.
‘All right!’ he bawled into it. ‘Come and get us, you stinking scab-devourers! Come and get us!’
With a heave of his arm, the priest sent the set shattering against the bulkhead. Then, with characteristic change of mood, he fell on his knees before Zac Deight’s body, in the first gesture of prostration, and began the last obsequies over it.
Fists clenched, Complain stared numbly out at the planet. He could not join the priest. The compulsion to perform ritual gestures over the dead had left him; he seemed to have grown beyond superstition. But what transfixed him was a realization which evidently had not occurred to Marapper, a realization which cancelled all their hopes.
After a thousand delays, they had found Earth was near. Earth was their true home. And Earth, on Zac Deight’s admission, had been taken over by Giants and Outsiders. It was against that revelation Complain had burnt his anger in vain.
V
Laur Vyann stood silent and helpless, watching the furious activity on Deck 20. She managed to stand by wedging herself in a broken doorway: the gravity lines on this deck had been severed in the assaults of Master Scoyt’s stormtroopers. Now directions in the three concentric levels had gone crazy; ups and downs existed that had never existed before, and for the first time Vyann realized just how ingeniously the engineers who designed the ship had worked. Half the deck, under these conditions, would be impossible to live in: the compartments were built on the ceilings.
Near Vyann, equally silent, were a cluster of Forwards women, some of them clutching children. They watched, many of them, the destruction of their homes.
Scoyt, clad only in a pair of shorts, black as a pot, had fully recovered from his gassing and was now dismantling the entire deck, as earlier he had begun to dismantle Deck 25. On receiving Complain’s message from Vyann, he had flung himself into the work with a ferocity terrible to watch.
His first move had been to have executed without further ado the two women and four men whom Pagwam, with some of the Survival Team, had found wearing the octagonal ring of the Outsiders. Under his insensate direction, as Complain had predicted, the turbulence of Hawl and his fellow brigands had been curbed – or, rather, canalized into less randomly destructive paths. With Gregg, his face and arm stump bandaged, out of the way, Hawl readily took his place; his shrunken face gleamed with pleasure as he worked the heat gun. The rest of Gregg’s mob worked willingly with him, unhampered by the lack of gravity. It was not that they obeyed Hawl, but that his demoniac will was theirs.
What had once been a neat honeycomb of corridor and living accommodation, now, in the light of many torches, looked like a scene from some fantastic everglades, cast in bronze. Throughout the cleared space – cleared though much of the metal was live enough with runaway voltage to make five dead men – girders of tough hull metal, the very skeleton of the ship, jutted solidly in all directions. From them projected icicles of lighter metals and plastics which had melted, dripped