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.
III
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.
Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt’s aid, willing to do anything they could to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain, sweating warriors, many of them Gregg’s men, who had experience of such tasks, attacked the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the clearance men, looting, gutting and filleting the place.
And so as soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat gun, blazing round the sides of the walls till the walls came tumbling down; they were carted off directly they were cool enough to touch. The laser did not melt the plastic which actually divided deck from deck — that metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air lock doors were built, something extra tough — but everything else fell away before it.
Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room marked ‘Laundry’. Splitting open a boiler, two of Gregg’s men revealed a crazy little maze of rat buildings, a rodent village. Different levels and flights of a bewildering complexity of design had been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth. There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters, rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and there were the rats, in nurseries and studs and armouries and slaughter houses. As Scoyt thrust the heat gun into the miniature city and it crackled up in flames, the rodents poured out savagely, leaping to the attack.
Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back. Gregg’s two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along the human chain, and demolition continued.
By now, the corridors of decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of trap-doors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.
‘The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable,’ Councillor Tregonnin protested. ‘This is destroying for destroying’s sake.’
He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont and Ruskin were present. Pagwam and other officers of the Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac Deight were missing.
By the messengers which had been despatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt had sent back word that he was ‘too busy’. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin’s request to fetch up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight’s sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor — but might there not be other traitors here, whom it would be wiser not to warn?
‘The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,’ Hawl shouted. ‘That’s obvious enough; why make an issue of it?’
‘You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled apart!’ Councillor Dupont protested.
‘It would get rid of the rats, anyway,’ Hawl said, and cackled with laughter.
Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the members of the Council; neither side liked the other’s manners. The meeting was disorganized for another reason: nobody could decide whether they wanted most to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange planet.
At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the situation.
‘What it amounts to’, he said, ‘is this. Scoyt’s policy can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be captured but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship down on to the surface of this planet.’