He dozed off and woke, then dozed off again—and this time there was a voice shouting and someone hammering at the door.
He came to his feet in one lithe motion, scrambled for the door, the key already in his fist, stabbing at the lock.
He jerked the door open and Mary stumbled in. She carried a great square can in one hand and a huge sack in the other and boiling down the corridor toward the door was a running mob that brandished clubs and screamed.
Jon reached down and hauled Mary clear, then slammed the door and locked it. He heard the running bodies thud against the door and then the clubs pounding at it and the people screaming.
Jon stooped above his wife.
"Mary," he said, his voice choking and his throat constricting. "Mary."
"I had to come," she said and she was crying when she said it. "I had to come," she said, "no matter what you did."
"What I have done," he said, "has been for the best. It was a part of the Plan, Mary. I am convinced of that. Part of the Master Plan. The people back on Earth had it all planned out. I just happened to be the one who . . .
"You are a heretic," she said. "You've destroyed our Belief. You have set the Folk at one another's throats. You . . ."
"I know the truth," he said. "I know the purpose of the ship . . ."
She reached up her hands and cupped his face between her palms and pulled his head down and cuddled him.
"I don't care," she said. "I don't care. Not any more, I don't. I did at first. I was angry with you, Jon. I was ashamed of you. I almost died of shame. But when they killed Joshua . . ."
"What was that!"
"They killed Joshua. They beat him to death. And he's not the only one. There were others who wanted to come and help you. Just a few of them. They killed them, too.
"There's killing in the ship. And hate. And suspicion. And all sorts of ugly rumors. It never was like that before. Not before you took away Belief."
A culture shattered, he thought. Shattered in the matter of an hour. A belief twitched away in the breadth of one split second.
There was madness and killing.
Of course there'd be.
"They are afraid," he said. "Their security is gone."
"I tried to come earlier," Mary said. "I knew you must be hungry and I was afraid there'd be no water. But I had to wait until no one was watching . . ."
He held her tight against him and his eyes were a little dim.
"There's food," she said, "and water. I brought all that I could carry."
"My wife," he said. "My darling wife . . ."
"There's food, Jon. Why don't you eat."
He rose and pulled her to her feet.
"In just a minute," he said. "I'll eat in just a minute. First I want to show you something. I want to show you Truth."
He led her up the steps.
"Look out there," he said. "That is where we're going. This is where we've been. No matter what we might have told ourselves, that out there is Truth."
PLANET II was the Holy Pictures come to life entire. There were Trees and Brooks, Flowers and Grass, Sky and Clouds, Wind and Sunshine. Mary and Jon stood beside the navigator's chair and stared out through the vision plate.
The analyzer gurgled slightly and spat out its report.
Safe for humans, said the printed slip, adding a great deal of data about atmospheric composition, bacterial count, violet-ray intensity and many other things. But the one conclusion was enough.
Safe for humans.
Jon reached out his hand for the master switch in the center of the board.
"This is it," he said. "This is the end of the thousand years."
He turned the switch and the dials all clicked to zero. The needles found dead center. The song of power died out in the ship and there was the olden silence—the silence of long ago, of the time when the stars were streaks and the walls were floors.
Then they heard the sound.
The sound of human wailing—as an animal might howl.
"They are afraid," said Mary. "They are scared to death. They won't leave the Ship."
And she was right, he knew. That was something that he had not thought of—that they would not leave the ship.
They had been tied to it for many generations. They had looked to it for shelter and security. To them the vastness of the world outside, the never-ending sky, the lack of a boundary of any sort at all, would be sodden terror.
Somehow or other they would have to be driven from the ship—literally driven from it, and the ship locked tight so they could not fight their way back in again.
For the ship was ignorance and cowering; it was a shell outgrown; it was the womb from which the race would be born anew.
Mary asked: "What will they do to us? I never thought of that. We can't hide from them, nor . . ."
"Not anything," said Jon. "They won't do anything. Not while I have this."
He slapped the gun at his side.
"But, Jon, this killing . . ."
"There won't be any killing. They will be afraid and the fear will force them to do what must be done. After a time, maybe a long time, they will come to their senses, and then there will be no further fear. But to start with there is a need of . . ."
The knowledge stirred within his brain, the knowledge implanted there by the strange machine.
"Leadership," he said. "That is what they'll need . . . someone to lead them, to tell them what to do, to help them to work together."
He thought bitterly: I thought that it had ended, but it hasn't ended. Bringing down the ship was not enough. I must go on from there. No matter what I do, so long as I live, there will be no end to it.
There was the getting settled and the learning once again.
There were the books in the chest, he remembered, more than half the chest packed full of books. Basic texts, perhaps. The books that would be needed for the starting over.
And somewhere, too, instructions? Instructions left with the books for a man like him to read and carry out.
INSTRUCTIONS TO BE PUT INTO EFFECT AFTER LANDING.
That would be the notation the envelope would carry, or another very like it, and he'd tear the envelope open and there would be folded pages. Once before, in another letter, there had been folded pages.
And the second letter?
There would be one, he was sure.
"It was planned on Earth," he said. "Every step was planned. They planned the great forgetting as the only way that humans could carry out the flight. They planned the heresy that handed down the knowledge. They made the ship so simple that anyone could handle it—anyone at all.
"They looked ahead and saw what was bound to happen. Their planning has been just a jump ahead of us every moment."
He stared out the vision plate at the sweep of land, at the trees and grass and sky.
"I wouldn't be surprised," he said, "if they figured out how to drive us off the ship."
A loudspeaker came to life and talked throughout the ship, so that everyone might hear.
Now hear this, it said, the old recording just a little scratchy. Now hear this. You must leave the ship within the next twelve hours. At the expiration of that time a deadly gas will be released inside the ship.
Jon reached out his hand to Mary.
"I was right," he said. "They planned it to the last. They're still that jump ahead of us."
They stood there, the two of them, thinking of those people who had planned so well, who had thought so far ahead, who had known the problems and had planned against them.