“Under ten thousand atmospheres I wouldn’t want there to be any. There are no engineering problems like that in space.”
“I suppose it’s just convenience,” repeated Mercer.
“There’s more to it than that. Nobody’s allowed to look outside. Not even the crew. All observations are made indirectly by externally mounted instruments. Yet just you try to find out why! There must be some kind of official phobia about space, or something.”
“What difference does it make?” Mercer said. “Perception is indirect anyway. You record the outside world with your sense organs and then present the recordings somewhere inside your brain, just like television. These screens are the internal end of the ship’s senses.”
“It’s still funny,” Brian muttered stubbornly.
“Well, it’s no use complaining. There’s bound to be a reason. It’s a matter of design.”
Brian gave up the argument. Mercer, he realised, was solidly trained scientifically. He had faith that the starship moved implacably through the void with all its affairs perfectly arranged. Mentally he was dominated by the fateful Declaration of Moscow issued by the Final Comintern of 2150 A.D.
The Comintern, from which present civilisation had sprung, had based science firmly on the Control of Nature by Man.
Brian recognised the achievements of Scientocratic Communism established at that time, and which had governed Earth ever since. But he often wondered about that particular item of doctrine, even though it had such a firm hold on the public mind. He wondered how seriously it was taken by the Inner Scientocrats themselves, two centuries later.
They left the vision room and wandered through the corridors for half an hour or so. Then Mercer announced his decision to go to bed.
“I’ve found it’s best to have regular habits,” he explained.
Brian nodded blankly. They arranged to meet next morning in the lounge, since they would probably miss one another at breakfast.
Brian himself did not go to his room straight away. He did not have the will to keep to a time-table, and besides, he had something on his mind. He went walking through the corridors, rooms and galleries of the huge ship. The passenger section was extensive, stretching practically from hull to hull, ending aft at the Engine Section, and giving for’ard to the equally sacrosanct parts which housed the scientocrat crew quarters.
Idly, he thought about Mercer. He had noticed that the mannerisms of boyhood had only slightly altered in form. He had the same expressions, the same ways of utterance. It was odd how it all survived in a man now much older.
He soon left behind the more populated parts of the ship. Towards the hull, the corridors of the passenger section did not end abruptly; they assumed the character of tunnels, with few intersections. Cabins, reading rooms and restaurants were left behind.
The lighting became functional and austere. Stained wood and pastel plastic gave way to plated steel. The tunnel was punctuated at intervals by telephones and panels of instruments whose meters Brian only dimly understood. More rarely, there were sections of the tunnel wall apparently designed to open up by the simple operation of a clasp: lockers containing some kind of stores or apparatus.
All this was standard equipment on an interstellar vessel. Brian was near the periphery of the ship, and he understood that these tunnels were usually visited only by crew members.
His excitement mounted as he realised that he was approaching nearer and nearer to the ultimate void. He was passing through the outer wrappings which wound protectively round the passenger compartments. Perhaps only feet separated him from the final hull plating. And that was only inches away from—absolute nothing.
Was it true that no one of any rank was allowed to look into space? Or was it permitted to Scientocrats, as he suspected? Did they monopolise the sight of the outer void?
He stopped. There was no sound in the stillness of the steel corridors. The constantly acting drive, a thousand feet away, was noiseless. But he gazed along the confines of the tunnel, trying to recover in his mind the whole of his experience of life.
He hadn’t formulated exactly why he had come on this trip, or why he was exploring these corridors now. There seemed no need, since there was no one to tell it to.
But the history of it was long. Though it was important to him, it was difficult to explain this importance to anyone else, even Mercer. He felt that the possibility of a fundamental experience lay beyond the curving enclosure of those steel walls.
Long ago, his attempts to think objectively had brought him up against a strange fact. It was not only human thinking that was subjective. Sight itself was subjective.
On Earth, the horizon set a boundary on vision which was never broken, even by gazing into the night sky. In addition, space was divided up and apportioned into a close-pressed multiplicity of objects: buildings, trees, people, hills, cloud and sky. The variegated and bounded environment seemed to occlude vision, distort it.
Brian was aware of this firm imprisonment of his consciousness. All his efforts to free perception from the objects around him had been of no avail. Only by peering into the uncluttered gulf beyond all worlds, in his belief, would his life come to a satisfactory conclusion.
At first, it had only been a stray thought. Then he had discovered the injunction against seeing beyond the hull of a starship. The strange ruling had endowed his notion with mystery. It was forbidden knowledge, promising to reveal unguessed secrets.
Perhaps it was fanciful, perhaps poetic, but it had a compelling effect on him.
He stepped forward again. Any time now, he should be hard up against the outer hull, which as far as most people knew, consisted of unbroken sheeting.
But Brian was banking on the principle that no system in a starship would be built without safety factors. The possibility of breakdown must be taken into account.
Abruptly, the tunnel turned a sharp angle and came to an end after running up a short, steep incline. The termination was crudely engineered; a roof curved overhead at an awkward angle, symmetrical with the rest of the construction, and reached down to within two feet of the floor.
It was clearly a larger wall which the tunnel had run into. Staring down from the roof, just above head-height, a heavy disc-plate stood out an inch and a half from the surrounding surface, studded with bolt-heads and painted over.
This was it. Brian placed first his cheek, then his ear against the roof-wall. The outer hull—or at least an inner lamination of it.
Reaching up, he tried to turn one of the bolt-heads. Naturally, it was quite immovable.
As he turned to go back the way he had come, he heard footsteps.
Freezing, he listened. They weren’t as near as he had thought at first—but they were quite near. He darted forward, back round the bend, then listened again. They became louder.
About twenty yards down the corridor, a figure appeared from an intersecting tunnel, crossed the corridor, then disappeared on the other side. Slowly, the footsteps faded away.
He hadn’t been seen, but it did show that the starship’s outer layers were not altogether deserted. He needed to be careful.
Quickly, he regained the populated parts of the ship and made his way to his own cabin. There, in a state of nervous exhaustion, he went to bed and immediately fell straight to sleep.
Brian met Mercer again in the main lounge the next day. When Mercer walked in, he was already waiting there, sitting quietly and watching the people around him.
Superficially, he seemed more cheerful, but talked less. It did not take Mercer long to realise that the apparent good humour was more nerves than anything else. Underneath, Brian was just as subdued, but something had been added. Usually, he gave the impression of purposelessness; today, he had tapped his inner resources and seemed to be going about something.