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 forever.
‘Something really devastating must be happening in the ship!’ Fermour exclaimed. In that ghastly fur river, he drowned his last fear of those who had once been his friends. This united them again.
‘There’s a tool kit in the air lock cubicle,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get it. There should be a saw in it. With that, we can cut our way back to the main part of the ship.’
He ran back the way they had come, returning with a clanking bag. Fumbling it open, he produced an atomic hand saw with a circular blade field; it crumbled away the molecular structure of a wall before their eyes. With a shrill grinding sound, the instrument bit out a shaky circle in the metal. They ducked through it, working their way almost by instinct to a known part of the deck. As if the ship had come to life while they were in the air lock, a faint hammering filled everywhere like an irregular heartbeat; Scoyt’s wreckers were busily at work. The air as they walked grew staler, the dark was hazed with smoke — and a familiar voice was calling for Complain.
In another moment, they rounded a bend at a trot, and there were Vyann and Gregg. The girl threw herself into Complain’s arms.
Hurriedly, he gave her his news. She told him of the devastation being wrought on the twenties decks. Even as she spoke, the lights about them glowed suddenly to great brilliance, then died, even the pilot lights fading completely out. At the same time, the gravity blew; they sprawled uncomfortably in mid-air.
Welling, it seemed, from the lungs of a whale, a groan rattled down the confines of the ship. For the very first time, they perceived the vessel to give a lurch.
‘The ship’s doomed!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Those fools are destroying it! You’ve got nothing to fear from the Giants now — by the time they get here, they’ll be a rescue party, picking desiccated bodies out of a wreck.’
‘You’ll never drag Roger Scoyt from the job he’s doing,’ Vyann said grimly.
‘Holy smother!’ Complain said. ‘This whole situation is just hopeless!’
‘The human predicament apart,’ Marapper said, ‘nothing is hopeless. As I see it, we’d be safest in the Control Room. If I can only control my feet, that’s where I’m going.’
‘Good idea, priest,’ Gregg said. ‘I’ve had enough of burning. It would be the safest place for Vyann, too.’
‘The Control Room!’ Fermour said. ‘Yes, of course…’
Complain said nothing, silently abandoning his plan to take Fermour before the Council; the hour was too late. Nor did there seem, in the circumstances, any hope of repelling the Giants.
Clumsily, with agonizing slowness, the party covered the nine decks which lay between them and the blister housing the ruined controls. At last they hauled themselves panting up the spiral stairs and through the hole Vyann and Complain had made earlier.
‘That’s funny,’ Marapper said. ‘Five of us started out from Quarters to reach this place: finally, three of us have done it together!’
‘Much good may it do us,’ Complain said. ‘I never knew why I followed you, priest.’
‘Born leaders need give no reasons,’ Marapper said modestly.
‘No, this is where we should be,’ Fermour said with excitement. He swung a torch round the vast chamber, taking in the fused mass of panels. ‘Behind this wrecked facade, the controls are still sound. Somewhere here is a device for closing off all inter-deck doors; they’re made of hull metal, and it would be a long while before they’d burn. If I can find that device…’