Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

Roffery’s nerve deserted him at once. He dropped the hatch down with a slam, and turned and ran. Complain splashed close behind. Next second, Roffery disappeared, swallowed by the water. Complain slopped abruptly. He could see at his feet, below the surface of the sea, the lip of a dark well. Roffery bobbed up again, a yard from him, in the well, striking the water and hollering. In the darkness, his face was apoplectic. Complain stretched out a hand to him, leaning forward as far as he dared. The other struggled to grasp it, floundered, and sank again in a welter of bubbles. The hubbub in the vast cavern was deafening.

When he appeared again, Roffery had found a footing, and stood chest-deep in the water. Panting and cursing, he pushed forward to seize Complain’s hand. At the same time, the trapdoor was flung open. The Giants were coming out. As Complain whirled round, he was aware of Roffery pausing to grab at his dazer, which would not be affected by damp, and of a pattern of crazy light rippling on the ceiling high above them. Without aiming, he fired his own dazer at a head emerging from the vault. The daze went wide. The Giant launched himself at them, and Complain dropped his weapon in panic. As he bent to scrabble for it in the shallow water, Roffery fired over his stooped back. His aim was better than Complain’s.

The Giant staggered and fell with a splash which roused the echoes. As far as Complain could remember afterwards, the monster had been unarmed.

The second Giant was armed. Seeing the fate of his companion, he crouched on the ladder, shielded by the curb, and fired twice. The first shot got Roffery in the face. Without a sound, he slipped beneath the water.

Complain dived flat, kicking up spray, but he was an easy target for the marksman. His temple stopped the second shot.

Limply, he slumped into the water, face down.

The Giant climbed out of the pit and came grimly towards him.

At the centre of the human metabolism is the will to live. So delicate is this mechanism that some untoward experience early in life can implant within it the opposite impulse, the will to die. The two drives lie quietly side by side, and a man may pass his days unaware of their existence; then some violent crisis faces him and, stripped momentarily of his superficial characteristics, his fatal duality is bare before him; and he must stop to wrestle with the flaw within before he can fight the external foe.

It was so with Complain. After oblivion, came only the frantic desire to retreat back into unconsciousness. But unconsciousness had rejected him, and the prompting soon came that he must struggle to escape from whatever predicament he was in. Then again, he felt no urge to escape, only the desire to submit and fade back into nothing. Insistently, however, life returned.

He opened his eyes for a moment. He was lying on his back in semi-darkness. A grey roof of some kind was only a few inches above his head. It was flowing backwards, or he was moving forwards: he could not tell which, and closed his eyes again. A steady increase in bodily sensation told him his ankles and wrists were lashed together.

His head ached, and a foul smell pervaded his lungs, making breathing an agony. He realized the Giant had shot him with some kind of gas pellet, instantly effective but ultimately, perhaps, innocuous.

Again he opened his eyes. The roof still seemed to be travelling backwards, but he felt a steady tremor through his body, telling him he was on some kind of moving vehicle. Even as he looked, the movement stopped. He saw a Giant loom beside him, presumably the one who had shot and captured him. Through half-closed eyes, Complain saw the immense creature was on hands and knees in this low place. Feeling on the roof, he now knuckled some kind of switch, and a section of the roof swung upwards.

From above came light and the sound of deep voices. Complain was later to recognize this slow, heavy tone as the typical manner of speech of the Giants. Before he had time to prepare for it, he was seized and dragged off the conveyance and passed effortlessly up through the opening. Large hands took hold of him and dumped him not ungently against the wall of a room.

‘He’s coming round,’ a voice commented, in a curious accent Complain hardly understood.

This observation worried him a great deal; partly because he thought he had given no indication he was recovering, partly because the remark suggested they might now gas him again.

Another body was handed up through the opening, the original Giant climbing up after it. A muttered conversation took place. From the little Complain could hear, he gathered that the body was that of the Giant Roffery had killed. The other Giant was explaining what had happened. It soon became apparent he was talking to two others, although Complain, from where he lay, could see only wall.

He slumped back into a mindless state, trying to breathe the dirty odour out of his lungs.

Another Giant entered from a side room and began talking in a peremptory tone suggestive of command. Complain’s captor began to explain the situation over again, but was cut short.

‘Did you deal with the flooding?’ the newcomer asked.

‘Yes, Mr Curtis. We fitted a new stopcock in place of the rusted one and switched the water off. We also unblocked the drainage and fitted a length of new piping there. We were just finishing off when Sleepy Head here turned up. The pool should be empty by now.’

‘All right, Randall,’ the peremptory voice addressed as Curtis said. ‘Now tell me why you started chasing these two dizzies.’

There was a pause, then the other said apologetically, ‘We didn’t know how many of them there were. For all we knew, we might have been ambushed in the inspection pit. We had to get out and see. I suppose that if we had realized to begin with that there were only two of them, we should have let them go without interfering.’

The Giants spoke so sluggishly that Complain had no difficulty in understanding most of this, despite the strange accent. Of its general intention he could make nothing. He was almost beginning to lose interest when he became the topic of conversation, and his interest abruptly revived.

‘You realize you are in trouble, Randall,’ the stern voice said. ‘You know the rules: it means a court martial. You will have difficulty in proving self-defence, to my mind. Especially as the other dizzy was drowned.’

‘He wasn’t drowned. I fished him out of the water and put him on the closed inspection hatch to recover in his own time.’ Randall sounded surly.

‘Leaving that question aside — what do you propose doing with this specimen you’ve brought here?’ Curtis demanded.

‘He’d have drowned if I had left him there.’

‘Why bring him here?’

‘Couldn’t we just knock him off and have done with it, Mr Curtis?’ One of the Giants spoke for the first time since Curtis had come in.

‘Out of the question. Criminal breach of the rules. Besides, could you kill a man in cold blood?’

‘He’s only a dizzy, Mr Curtis,’ spoken defensively.

‘Could he go for rehabilitation?’ Randall suggested, in the tone of one dazzled by the brightness of his own idea.

‘He’s far too old, man! You know they only take children. What the deuce was the idea of bringing him here?’

‘Well, as I say, I couldn’t leave him there, and after I fished his pal out, I — well, it’s pretty creepy there and — I thought I heard something. So I — nipped him to safety with me quickly.’

‘It’s quite obvious you panicked, Randall,’ Curtis said. ‘We certainly don’t want a spare dizzy here. You’ll have to take him back, that’s all.’ The voice was curt and decisive. Complain took heart from it; nothing would suit him better than to be taken back. Not, he realized, that he had much fear of the Giants; now he was among them, they seemed too slow and gentle for malice. Curtis’s was not an attitude he understood, but it was certainly convenient.