He waved the atomic saw to finish his meaning, searching already for the board he wanted.
‘The ship must be saved!’ he said, ‘and there is a chance we can do it, if we can only separate the decks.’
‘Damn the ship!’ Marapper said. ‘All we want it to do now is hold together until we can get off it.’
‘You can’t get off it,’ Fermour said. ‘You’d better realize the fact. You must none of you reach Earth. The ship is where you belong and stay. This is a non-stop trip: there is no Journey’s End.’
Complain whirled round on him.
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. His voice was so charged with emotion that it sounded flat.
‘It’s not my doing,’ Fermour said hastily, scenting trouble. ‘It’s just that this situation is too formidable for any of you. The ship is in an orbit round Earth, and there it must stay. That was the edict of the World Government which set up the Little Dog authority to control this ship.’
Complain’s gesture was angry, but Vyann’s was supplicatory.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why must the ship stay here? It’s so cruel… We are Earth people. This terrible double journey to Procyon and back — it’s been made, and somehow it now seems we’ve survived it. Shouldn’t — oh, I don’t know what happens on Earth, but shouldn’t people have been glad to have us back, happy, excited…?’
‘When this ship, “Big Dog” — so christened in jocular allusion to the constellation Little Dog for which it set out — was detected in Earth’s telescopes, finally returning from its long journey, everyone on Earth was, as you say — happy, excited, marvelling.’ Fermour paused. This event had taken place before he was born, but the epic had often been retold to him. ‘Signals were sent out to the ship,’ he continued; ‘they were never answered. Yet the ship kept speeding on towards Earth. It seemed inexplicable. We have passed the technological phase of our civilization, but nevertheless factories were speedily built and a fleet of little ships launched towards “Big Dog”. They had to find out what was happening aboard.
‘They matched velocities with this giant vessel, they boarded her. They found — well, they found out about everything; they found that Dark Ages had settled over the whole ship, as the result of an ancient catastrophe.’
‘The Nine Day Ague!’ Vyann breathed.
Fermour nodded, surprised she should know.
‘The ship could not be allowed to go on,’ he said. ‘It would have sped on forever through the galactic night. These controls were discovered as you now see them: ruined — the work, presumably, of some poor madman generations ago. So the Drive was switched off at source, and the ship dragged into an orbit by the little ships which, using gravity for towlines, acted as tugs.’
‘But — why leave us aboard?’ Complain said. ‘Why did you not take us down after the ship was in orbit? As Laur says, it was cruel — inhuman!’
Reluctantly, Fermour shook his head.
‘The inhumanity was in the ship,’ he said. ‘You see, the crew who survived this virus you seem to know about had undergone a slight physiological modification; the new proteins permeating every living cell in the ship increased their metabolic rate. This increase, undetectable at first, has grown with every generation, so that now you are all living at four times the speed you should be.’
He quailed with pity as he told them — but their looks held only disbelief.
‘You’re lying to scare us,’ Gregg said, his eyes glittering amid the wrappings of his face.
‘I’m not,’ Fermour said. ‘Instead of a life expectation for an average human of eighty years, yours is only twenty. The factor does not spread itself evenly over your life: you tend to grow more quickly as children, have a fairly normal adulthood, and then crumble suddenly in old age.’
‘We’d have noticed if this scoundrel scheme were so!’ Marapper howled.
‘No,’ Fermour said. ‘You wouldn’t. Though the signs were all round you, you could not see them, because you have no standards of comparison. For instance, you accepted the fact that one sleep-wake in four was dark. Living at four times the normal rate, naturally four of your days or sleep-wakes only made one ordinary one. When the ship was a going concern — on the voyage out to Procyon — the lights automatically dimmed all over the vessel from midnight to six, partly to give a friendly illusion of night, partly to allow the servicers to work behind scenes, making any necessary repairs. That brief six-hour shift is a whole day to you.’
Now the comprehension was growing on them. It seemed, oddly enough, to soak from the inside to the outside, as if, in some mystical way, the truth had been trapped in them all along. The awful pleasure of making them know the worst — they who had tortured him — filled Fermour. He went on, suddenly keen to make them see how damned they were.
‘That’s why we proper Earthmen call you “dizzies”: you live so fast, it makes us dizzy. But that isn’t all that is wrong with you! Imagine this great ship, still automatically functioning despite the lack of anyone to control it. It supplied everything: except the things which, by its nature, it could not supply, fresh vitamins, fresh air, fresh sunlight. Each of your succeeding generations becomes smaller; Nature survives how she may, and that was her way of doing it, by cutting down on the required materials. Other factors, such as inbreeding, have changed you until — well, it was decided you were virtually a separate race. In fact, you had adapted so well to your environment, it was doubtful if you would be able to survive if transferred down on Earth!’
Now they had it, knowing it right down to the pits of their stomachs. Fermour turned from their sealed faces, ashamed of himself for feeling triumph. Methodically, he resumed prodding about for the particular panel he wanted. He found it, and they were still all standing in choked silence. Using the saw, he began eagerly to work away the seared casing.
‘So we’re not human beings at all…’ Complain exclaimed, as if speaking to himself. ‘That’s what you’re saying. All that we’ve suffered, hoped, done, loved… it’s not been real. We’re just funny little mechanical things, twitching in a frenzy, dolls activated by chemicals… Oh, my God!’
As his voice fell, they all heard the noise. It was the noise they had heard by the personnel lock, the noise of a million rats, flowing irresistibly through the hard honeycomb of the ship.
‘They’re heading here!’ Fermour yelled. ‘They’re coming this way! It’s a dead end. They’ll swamp us! We’ll be torn to pieces!’
Now he had the casing off, tearing it away with his hands, flinging it behind him. Beneath it, severed from their toggles, lay eighty-four double ranks of transistors. Using the side of his saw, Fermour frantically bashed the pairs together. Sparks flew and — the terrible sound of the rodent army cut off abruptly. Every deck was closed from its neighbour; all the inter-deck doors, on every level, had clicked firmly shut, tombing off further communication.
Gasping, Fermour rocked back against the panelling. He had worked the trick just in time. The thought of the horrible death he had so narrowly avoided overcame him, and he was sick on the floor.
‘Look at him, Roy!’ Gregg shouted, pointing his sound hand in scorn. ‘You were wrong about us, Roy! We’re as good as he, or better. He’s scared green…’
He advanced to Fermour, clenching his one good fist; Marapper followed, dragging out a knife.
‘Someone’s got to be sacrificed for all this deadly wrong,’ the priest said, through clenched teeth, ‘and it’s going to be you, Fermour — you’re going to make the Long Journey on behalf of twenty-three generations of suffering! It would be a nice gesture.’