Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

Complain pressed her hand.

‘I’ve been in and out of it while you were sleeping,’ he said cheerfully.

Gregg was already in the middle of the cell, standing on the battered crate which served here as a chair, peering up at the grille above his head.

‘Roy’s right!’ he announced. ‘There’s an obstruction on the other side of this thing. I can see some crumpled metal up there. Hand me up that heat gun and let’s try our luck.’

‘Stand from under!’ Complain warned him. ‘Or you’ll shower yourself with melted metal.’

Nodding, Gregg aimed the weapon as Scoyt handed it up, and depressed the button. The glassy arc of heat bit into the ceiling, drawing a red weal on it. The weal broadened, the ceiling sagged, metal came gooing down like shreds of pulverized flesh. Through the livid hole, other metal showed; it too, began to glow lividly. Noise filled the room, smoke cascaded about them and out into the corridor, bitter smoke which rasped their eyeballs. Above the uproar came a crackling explosion, and just for a second the lights flashed on with unexpected brilliance then died away to nothing.

‘That should do it!’ Gregg exclaimed with immense satisfaction, climbing down from his perch and eyeing the gaping ruin above him. His beard twitched in excitement.

‘I really think we ought to hold a full Council meeting before we do anything as drastic as this, Master Scoyt!’ Councillor Ruskin said plaintively, surveying the ruin of the cell.

‘We’ve done nothing but hold Council meetings for years,’ Scoyt said. ‘Now we’re going to act.’

He ran into the corridor and bellowed furiously, producing in very short time a dozen armed men and a ladder.

Complain, who felt he had more experience of this kind of thing than the others, went to fetch a bucket of water from the nearby guards’ quarters, flinging it up over the tortured metal to cool it. In the ensuing cloud of steam, Scoyt thrust the ladder into place and climbed up with his dazer ready. One by one, as quickly as possible, the others followed, Vyann keeping close to Complain. Soon the whole party stood in the strange room above the cell.

It was overwhelmingly hot; the air was hard to breathe. Their torches soon picked out the reason for the blocked grille and the collapsed inspection way below their feet: the floor of this chamber had undergone a terrific denting in some long-past explosion. A machine — perhaps left untended in the time of the Nine Day Ague, Complain thought — had blown up, ruining every article and wall in the place. A staggering quantity of splintered glass and silicone was scattered all over the floor. The walls were pitted with shrapnel. But there was not a trace of a Giant.

‘Come on!’ Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the wreckage towards one of two doors. ‘Let’s not waste time here.’

The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the laser and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their torch beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.

‘No sign of life…’ Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of unease.

They stood in a side corridor, sealed off from the rest of the ship, entombed, scattering their torchlight about convulsively. It was so achingly hot they could hardly see over their cheek bones.

One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice was stencilled. Crowding together, they shuffled to read what it said:

DUTYMEN ONLY CARGO HATCH — AIR LOCK

DANGER!

A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN UNTIL YOU GET THE SIGNAL’. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.

‘What are you doing — waiting to get a signal?’ Hawl grated at them. ‘Melt the door down, Captain!’

‘Wait!’ Scoyt said. ‘We ought to be careful here. What’s an air lock, I’d like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks, but what’s an air lock?’

‘Never mind what it is. Melt it down!’ Hawl repeated, waggling his grotesque head. ‘It’s your lousy ship, Captain — make yourself at home!’

Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.

‘Must be special metal,’ he said.

One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone laughed sharply at the slackening of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed. They were free to move into the cargo air lock.

Instead of moving, they stood pixilated by a stream of light which beat remorselessly upon them. The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window looking into space.

This was not the meagre pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained rooted in the entrance.

Beyond the window, with stars tossed prodigiously into it like jewels into an emperor’s sack, roared the unending stillness of space. It was something beyond the comprehension to gaze upon, the mightiest paradox of all, for although it gave an impression of unyielding blackness, every last pocket of it glistened with multi-coloured pangs of light.

Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.

Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright blind blue as a new-born kitten’s eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm’s length. It scintillated into dazzling white at its centre, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.

Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the miracle of it. They were struck dumb, deaf and dizzy by its sublimity.

At last it was Vyann who spoke.

‘Oh, Roy darling,’ she whispered. ‘We have arrived somewhere, after all! There’s still a hope for us, there’s still some sort of a hope.’

Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something was he had wanted all his life.

It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was just to see Laur’s face — by sunlight.

Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to every man, woman and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident was a mere irrelevance, almost a set-back in the priority task of hunting down the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a cat-nap and some food, he proceeded to put into action.

The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going entirely to dismantle Deck 25.

Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it, and you would have a perfect no-man’s-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a hunt could be started down all the inspection ways and the Giants would be unable to escape.