The Mile Long Spaceship (3 page)

It wasn't the speed that was used to get anywhere in particular, it was used mainly in adjusting a course or scouting an unexplored area of the still fathomless reaches of space. Here it seemed the ship stood firmly anchored to an invisible support while the black curtain of the heavens rolled along carrying with it the incredible lights of the stars. Each stately movement, in its own speed, independent of all others, was a graceful but invincible predetermined flight to keep a rendezvous with its destiny somewhere in the infinity that was time and space. Now and again one of the never faltering points would gather into itself added glory and for a time would glow more brightly, then it too would be gone from view and in its place might come a pair, a cautiously circling couple, much like two diffident male dogs becoming acquainted, unwilling to close in, unable to draw apart. Ever changing, but really changeless, that was the space Royle knew and loved.

The dagger of Orion at our back, he thought musingly, on a course that will take us ever farther from the glowing Milky Way clouds. He shook himself and then became aware of another spectator standing ten feet behind him gazing in awe at the sight of space.

"Mr. Giroden, you were not to leave your quarters," Royle said, but not unkindly. He couldn't blame the passenger for leaving. The stateroom offered no protection.

"Sorry, Captain, but I thought you should know about Perez. I think he's gone mad." Giroden's eyes didn't leave the screen however and his voice was casual as if he bad come mostly to pass the time. He was probably the highest paid popular writer of all times.

"What's with Perez?" Royle asked sharply, unable for a moment to recall the man. Then he had him. A little man. Fastidious to the point of phobic behavior. A semantics professor on a sabbatical gathering information for a forthcoming book.

Giroden drew in closer to the screen and watched it as he answered. It was the first time he had seen space outside the small monitor in the public lounge. "I called him a few minutes ago for his chess move and when he answered he was waving a knife around saying he would kill the devils himself. Quite gone, I should think."

Royle studied the younger man thoughtfully for a second. "You don't seem particularly affected by it. Why?"

"Perez? He's well out of it, Captain. I envy him really. Now he has an enemy to fight." Giroden grinned crookedly as he turned then to face Royle.

A faint frown cut the lines of Royle's face a bit deeper and be sighed heavily. "I suppose I'd better go see about him," he said flicking off the screen.

"Why? Let him alone and he'll end up cutting his throat. It's quick and merciful."

"Come on, Giroden, out," Royle said shortly, agreeing mentally, knowing he couldn't sit by and allow it however. "He might get loose and start playing with the paying customers." They left the engine room and he locked it as Giroden watched.

"Hmm. That reminds me," Giroden said. "Are those staterooms fireproof?"

"Yes, why?"

"Just wondering. This thing, whatever it is, takes heat from its victims and when my own temperature starts nosediving, I'll give it heat."

Royle stared at him hard, then turned abruptly and stalked away down the companionway. Perez's door was locked, as he had expected, and he quickly selected a key and used it. Perez was huddled against the far wall, never a great distance aboard a stellar ship, brandishing a knife obviously from the galley. Royle leaned against the door easily and asked in a pleasant voice, "How are you feeling, Mr. Perez?"

"I know who you are. You can't fool me. You brought him aboard ship, didn't you?" Perez didn't shift his position as his eyes darted from Royle to the communicator. "He'll be there again soon and this time I'll get him."

"Mind if I wait also, Perez? I'm tired of being alone."

"Aloneness, that is the curse of mankind. And men like him come with words. Words are the invention of the devil, and the devil is the invention of men like him. They want to frighten us and they use words. You can dissect them and they mean nothing. And in the end we have nothing but meaningless sounds." His eyes gleamed wildly but he was alert for a movement from the screen.

"I've always felt that way too, Perez," Royle said, keeping his voice quiet.

"You?" Perez screamed at him. "What are you? An empty shell! Go away emptiness! You brought him. You brought it. Life in death... eternity in an inkling... imagination proposes, reason disposes. I am reason. Life in death! What does it mean?" His eyes were burning holes as he raved shrilly. "Do you know what words are? Inventions of the devils he conjured to keep our souls in subjection! No words can break through the shell of emptiness that is man."

Royle nodded again and slid one foot out before the other one. As long as the man had the keen knife at waist height ready to slash out with it, he did not want to make any sudden movements.

"Truth is significant, but so is falsehood. Did you know that? It's arrangement that turns them to nonsense. Words are true and real. Beautiful words. He degrades them. There is something—ghost or disease or devils—that is killing all of us and he calls them forth. By incantations of nonsense he summons them and I'll kill him. They'll go with him because they are only projections of his dark mind."

He never even saw Royle leap at him and later, confined by the nylon webbing of his berth, he dropped into a deep sleep. Royle stood over him panting slightly, a pitying look on his face.

He locked Perez in and stomped back to the engine room brooding darkly on the future of the Criterion and her passengers: Giroden making plans for his funereal pyre, Perez creating an enemy to be destroyed, even poor Custens, the least imaginative man on the ship, theorizing that the thing traveled with the food, depriving himself of sustenance hoping to forestall further spread. Futile. All of it. Savagely he barked into the communicator that he wanted to talk to all of them. He manipulated the controls that automatically focused in all the staterooms bringing the occupants together, seemingly grouped in one large room.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you all know about the disease we have contacted and I'll not go into that right now. However, if any of you has any suggestion, regardless of how remote its possibilities might seem, now's the time to voice it."

"Captain," it was Mrs. Windlass, the beautiful, honeymooning bride, "if Capella Four does know anything, aren't we getting too far away for a message to reach us?"

"As long as we don't go into over-drive, it'll catch up with us," he answered gently and watched as she lowered her eyes again.

Hopeless eyes, frightened eyes, tired, red-rimmed eyes. He scowled at them, wishing savagely that they had all disembarked at the last port along with the majority of the passengers. Windlass, his florid face mottled with the grey of fatigue and fear in contrast to the delicately carved face of his bride, so composed and calm she might have been mistaken for a nonfunctioning android. When she raised her eyes to catch his glance, Royle quickly flicked his own away, feeling as if he caught her naked. She had given him a look of pure trust.

The minister's lips moved with his perpetual prayers and his eyes had a glazed look almost of autohypnosis. The Clevers, traveling on government expense account, were trying so hard to be worldly about it all. He caught sight of the Dryod woman, laughing hysterically—but soundlessly—rocking back and forth on her bed. Abruptly he raised his eyes front the screen.

"If you wish," he said slowly, "you may leave your staterooms. Frankly, isolation doesn't seem to be the answer. Today we blasted Mr. Maller off in a lifeboat." He watched closely then. Which of them would break next, he wondered.

Their insistent, shrill voiccs raised in bedlam and only now and then could he catch snatches of what they were saying.

"You mean it's hopeless! We're as good as dead, aren't we?"

"You're mad! I thought every stateroom was independently sealed."

"You can't make me leave..."

"Insane! We'll be sure to catch...."

"Take us home! Let the doctors take care of us! Please, please..."

Stonily he stared at a point slightly above the set before him, not seeing any of them for a time. Finally they subsided and he stated emphatically, "We cannot return to any civilized planet, or to any other world where men might some day venture. This thing we have is deadly and extremely contagious; that we know." He paused and continued more gently, "I don't know that you'll all catch it, but staying in your rooms won't prevent it. Maller had been isolated in his cabin 17 days when he started showing symptoms. The message with a cure or treatment might come at any time, or we might be immune; we just don't know. I'll be in the engine room if any of you wants to talk to me." He cut the communicator out and sat back remembering the past weeks, starting with the message of a damaged ship in distress on an uninhabited planet.

The first six, the original landing party searching for a downed ship, hadn't located anything living. Only the wind driven ashes of the ship. Lab said there was nothing in the air, nothing in the soil harmful. Lab insinuated that the captain of the ship had gone mad and blown it up himself. Lab decontaminated the six returnees and went back to its customary duties. And three weeks later five of the six were well on their way to death. During the next five weeks eighteen of the crew and seven passengers died, the doctor and his three assistants among them. Before he died, the doctor experimented with drugs. With X-rays. He made autopsies. They all died in convulsive attacks until Royle gave the orders that stricken persons were to be destroyed before that stage was reached, and then they used the lifeboats, the air doctored with sleeping gas which eased the dying. All the routine steps to avoid further spread of the disease had proven useless. Isolation, quarantine, massive doses of Universal Vaccine....

Three times the living had donned space suits and waited out the decontamination period during which the entire ship was sterilized. And now Maller was gone and Custens infected. Royle stared glumly ahead not seeing the machinery nor the face of the computer board, seeing instead the only end that could await them if Capella Four didn't come through in time. Wearily he rose from his chair and headed for the galley.

He changed the controls so that he could order the meals for the days that lay ahead of them. Nothing that would require sharp utensils. He was relocking the door when the All Church minister came hurrying toward him. "Dr. Kscievitch, did you wish to see me?"

"Yes. Mr. Perez's door is locked. I think I should go to him. Perhaps I can help." The preacher was tall, taller even than Royle's six foot frame and, robed in his glowing black, he appeared even higher and somehow majestic.

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't allow that. Mr. Perez is quite mad, I'm afraid. You couldn't help him now."

"You haven't the right to decide that, Captain. The man obviously needs help, and I feel that perhaps I can give him the understanding to make this more bearable."

"Doctor, do you have a plan? Have you the facilities to cure a deranged mind? Have you studied chemiopsychology?"

The minister drew himself up stiffly and said sternly, "You'd do well to take heed and consult with me yourself, Captain. Prayer always can help. Only those who have lost faith in their religion have reason to be afraid now. This could well be mankind's supreme trial."

"Yes, Doctor, I understand, but believe me, you can't help Perez now. He seems to think you might be at the bottom of this mess, and his only goal in life now is to kill you." Abruptly he left the minister and started on down the hall. Just as suddenly he pivoted about and retraced the few steps he had taken, "I'm sorry, Doctor. Of course, for those who need you, you are indispensible now and you should go to them. Help them find comfort. But not Perez." He smiled wryly and added, "And if you can bring yourself to do it, you might give some thought during your meditations on how we can get out of this dilemma. Otherwise, sir, the day my own temperature starts down, the ship has to be destroyed."

"What do you mean? Why?"

"Because I couldn't trust some of the people aboard her to let her continue on the course we have set, and only by leaving humanity far behind can we be sure of not spreading this sickness before our doctors know how to counter it."

"But destroy the ship! That would be murder!"

"You see our difference, Doctor? You want to save humanity for the hereafter and I want to save it in the here-now." His steps set up mocking echoes that drowned out the murmuring voice of the minister whose head was bowed in prayer.

He tapped lightly on Stephanie Dryod's door and, getting no answer, let himself in and stood inside the door for a moment. Quietly he said, "Miss Dryod, I've come to help you."

The angular woman was sobbing uncontrollably on the bed, but at the sound of his voice she began to shriek and crawled away burrowing herself under the plastic coverlet.

Royle sighed heavily and palmed the hypodermic in his hand. With his other hand he whipped the coverlet from her and before she could clamber away, he had the needle against her upper arm. She slept instantly. He'd give her care over to the minister, he thought absently. Keep them both calmed down.

The day passed and the words of Giroden kept interfering with his thoughts. A funereal pyre. Give it heat. What? What could attack an organism as complex as man and siphon away heat without leaving traces of its existence? A spore, or filterable virus? Capella Four said unlikely. He brooded over it until he dozed, upright in a chair, and he dreamed of vampires draining the very life from their victims. He awakened with a jerk that nearly upended his chair. Vampires? Angrily he cursed the authorities for not having research doctors on the ships in place of the methodically plodding old service medics who fought eagerly for berths aboard luxury liners to serve out their final years before retirement. He spent the day in the engine room, mechanically attending the small routines of maintaining course while his brain worked feverishly on the problem of isolating the sickness. Not a virus, nor a spore. No organ attacked, but the entire organism.... An invisible something that had come aboard from a dead world. Something had infected... attached itself... to 6 men and killed them all. Only after their deaths had others been attacked. It drained its host of heat slowly, inexplicably, and didn't depart for a new host until the temperture dropped to—room temperature!