Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [97]
Vyann could not repress a shiver of fright at the stealth of his appearance. If she, for any reason, should wish to cry for help, nobody would hear her in this lost corner of the ship.
He came up and touched her arm. She could see his lips among the swathes of bandage.
‘I want to come with you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I followed you through the crowd – I was no use back there like this.’
‘Why did you follow me?’ she asked, withdrawing her arm.
She thought he smiled beneath his lint visor.
‘Something’s gone wrong,’ he said, very quietly. When he saw she did not understand, he added, ‘In the ship, I mean. We’re all for it now. This is Lights Out. You can feel it down in your bones . . . Let me come with you, Laur; you’re so . . . Oh, come on, it’s getting hot.’
She moved ahead without speaking. For some reason, her eyes stung with tears; they were, after all, all in the same boat.
While Marapper was making his prostrations over the burnt-out body of Zac Deight, Complain roved round the air lock, gauging its possibilities. If the Giants were coming up from Earth in force, this place had to be defended, and that must be the first thing to worry about. A flush-fitting door, leading to an ante-room in the lock, stood in one wall; Complain pulled it open. It was a mere cubicle from which control could be kept over what came and went in the lock itself. Now, a man lay in it on a rough bunk.
It was Bob Fermour!
He greeted his ex-companion with terror, having heard through an open air valve all that had transpired on the other side of the door. The gentle interrogations of Scoyt and his friends, rapidly interrupted though they had been by the Giants coming to his deliverance, had removed most of the skin from Fermour’s back, as well as a percentage of his moral fibre. He had been left cowering here, while his rescuers returned to Curtis, to wait for a relief ship to come and take him home; now he was convinced he was about to make the Long Journey.
‘Don’t hurt me, Roy!’ he begged. ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know – things you never guessed. Then you won’t want to kill me!’
‘I can’t wait to hear,’ Complain said grimly. ‘But you’re coming straight back to the Council to tell them: I find it dangerous to be the only one who receives these confidences.’
‘Not back into the ship, Roy, please, I beg you. I’ve had enough of it all. I can’t face it again.’
‘Get up!’ Complain said. Seizing Fermour by the wrist, he swung him up and pushed him into the air lock. Then he kicked Marapper gently in his ample, episcopal buttocks.
‘You ought to have grown out of that mumbo jumbo, priest,’ he said. ‘Besides, we’ve no time to waste. We shall have to get Scoyt and Gregg and everyone here to this deck for a mass attack when the Giants arrive. Our only hope, that I can see, is to seize their ship when it comes.’
Red-faced, the priest rose, dusting off his knees and banging dandruff from his shoulders. He manoeuvred so that Complain stood between him and Fermour, avoiding the latter as if he had been a ghost.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said to Complain. ‘Although as a man of peace, I greatly regret all this bloodshed. We must pray to Consciousness that the blood may be theirs, rather than ours.’
Leaving the old councillor to lie where he had fallen, they prodded Fermour out of the lock and back towards the trapdoor in the littered corridor. As they went, a strange noise haunted their ears. At the trap, halting in apprehension, they found the origin of the sound. Beneath their feet, swarming along the inspection way, was a host of rats. Some of them glanced pinkly up at Marapper’s torch; none faltered in their rapid advance towards the bow of the ship. Brown rats, small rats, grey rats, tawny rats, some with belongings strapped to their backs, hurried to the pipe of fear.
‘We can’t get down there!’ Complain said. His stomach twisted at the idea.
The ominous thing was the determined way the swarm moved as if nothing could divert it. It looked as if it might pour on beneath their feet