Robert Silverberg: Voyage to Procyon

In the deepest level of the mighty Starship 1, Peter Conroy lay hidden in a cornfield. Around him waved the tall stalks of ripening corn; high overhead, near the distant ceiling of the level, blazed the actinic lights that irradiated the broad field.

And nearby, Conroy could hear the stealthy footsteps of Bayliss Kent and his men, searching desperately for him. They had to find him—and Peter Conroy had to keep from being found.

Crouching low, he edged forward between the bending stalks. Kent thought he had Conroy hemmed in, that he had the entrance to the cornfield guarded. Conroy grinned. He had been brought up in the Agronomy section; Kent and his men hadn’t. It made a difference.

He looked around carefully, then began moving slowly away from them on his hands and knees. If I can only reach the irrigation tube in time, he thought. If —

It had been over fifty years since the Starship 1 had left Earth. For more than half a century, the great ship had been headed toward the star Procyon and the planets around it—habitable planets, detected by the Lunar telescope. Fifty years, and there was still a hundred years of flight yet to come before the huge ship reached her destination.

Conroy and all the others of his generation had been born on I he ship, as had most of their parents before them. The ship, with its vast farms, its great factories, and its clusters of living centers, was all the world they knew.

But Bayliss Kent and his party of malcontents wanted to change all that. They wanted to go back to Earth.

Suddenly, something crinkled under Conroy’s knee, and he froze. A dry leaf—nothing more. But had the others heard it?

He couldn’t be sure. The searchers were making quite a bit of noise themselves, and perhaps they might have thought it was one of their own group who had made the sound. He decided to risk it, and moved on.

Just ahead of him was the irrigation tube. Again Conroy called on his special knowledge of the Agronomy section. This particular acreage of corn was in the harvest season—almost ready to cut. There wouldn’t be any water in the irrigation tubes now.

The tube was a little over three feet across and dropped down into the sub-levels of the ship, where the water-purifiers were. Conroy peered into the tube’s depths for a moment, then lifted up the hinged cover, lowered himself into the tube, and braced his feet against one side and his shoulders against the other.

Closing the cover, then, in total blackness, he began to lower himself down the tube. Hands, shoulders, feet; hands, shoulders, feet. Over and over again, as mountain climbers work their way up and down crevasses.

After several minutes, he was startled by a sudden glow of light from above. He glanced up. The opening of the tube was nearly a hundred feet overhead now. He wondered if they would be able to pick him out in the darkness, this far down the shaft.

“Can you see him?” called a voice that echoed through the steel tube. Conroy could see a head silhouetted against the light.

“It goes straight down, and there’s no ladder,” came the reply. It was Bayliss Kent’s voice. “I don’t see him down there.”

“What kind of tube is this?” the first voice asked. Hal Lester, Kent’s chief henchman.

“Irrigation, I think.”

“Well, if he has managed to get down it, he’s gotten clean away. Bayliss, I told you we shouldn’t have let Conroy know our plans.”

“Never mind that now!” Kent snapped coldly. “Search the cornfield! He must be here somewhere—and we’ve got to find him before the local agronomist comes by on his inspection rounds.”

There was the sound of the door being lowered, and darkness came again. Peter Conroy heaved a sigh of relief and continued working his way down the tube.

He knew these tubes well. His father was an Agronomist, and, until Peter had taken up navigation, he had helped his father on the farmlands. The ship was like a sealed world, a hollow metal planet five miles in diameter that was carrying its crew through space on the generations-long voyage to Procyon.

Or would the starship ever get to Procyon? Was Bayliss Kent going to succeed in his plan to force the Commander to reverse the ship and return to Earth?

Not if they depended on Peter Conroy to navigate for them, they wouldn’t!

Conroy, working his way down the tube, suddenly felt emptiness as he lowered one foot. He had come to the end of the vertical tube. Twisting himself upright, he dropped the remaining six feet into the huge arterial tube that ran horizontally into this sector of the ship. The escape hatch shouldn’t be too far from here. The pipes needed cleaning after the irrigation period was over and the tubes had entrance ports for the purpose. Conroy strode down the tube in total darkness, keeping one hand against the side. He opened the hatch and found himself in one of the pumping rooms.

“Halt right there!” a voice said. “You’re under arrest!”

It was one of the pumping room guards, levelling a snub-nosed stun gun at him. “Who are you? You know it’s illegal to be in the irrigation tubes without authorization.”

“I know,” said Conroy. He knew he had no time to make explanations. He had to get to the Ship’s Commander.

He stepped forward too quickly for the astonished guard to react. His fist ploughed into the man’s chin, and his other arm deflected the snout of the stun gun just enough to send the neutrino stream over his left shoulder. The gun clattered to the floor.

The guard turned, aimed a wild swing. Conroy walked inside the other man’s guard and dropped him with a short punch to the stomach. Whirling, he grabbed the stun gun and gave the man a brief, numbing blast.

Opening the entrance to the tube, he dumped the unconscious guard in, saluted the disappearing man with grim irony, and slammed the door closed, jamming the lock. It would be quite some time before the guard found his way out of the tubes.

He put the stun gun in his belt and pulled his tunic down over it. Then he headed for the levitator shaft that would take him up to Officer’s Territory.

It was not easy for a young officer to get to see the Captain; the old man held many lives in his hands, and he was busy most of the time. But Peter Conroy didn’t dare trust his message to one of the underlings; he had no way of knowing how many of them were already sympathizers with Bayliss Kent. Undoubtedly, many of the younger officers were with him.

Kent’s idea was simple. Why should the younger generation spend their entire lives cooped up on the Starship 1, he asked? If the ship were turned around now and full power were applied, they could make it back to Earth in a little over ten years. That, of course, would use up all the fuel that would normally be used in the next hundred years—but what would that matter, if they were back on Earth?

And Bayliss Kent had also pointed out that there was no possible danger of a counter-revolution. Once the ship started back, it would have burned so much fuel that it could only continue on to Earth—it couldn’t try for Procyon again.

To many of the younger men, it seemed like a good idea.

But they needed a navigator. The logical one, they had thought, was Peter Conroy. But Conroy, shocked at the idea of mutiny against the Captain, had made the mistake of telling Bayliss Kent to his face that he would have nothing to do with the plot.

They had been in a Shopping Center at the time. Kent had simply drawn his gun and marched Conroy to the Agricultural Section. The idea had been to kill him and bury him in the field. The body wouldn’t be found for at least a year, possibly never.