The Black Corridor

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ryan lies in his bunk with his log-book and his stylus. He has been there for two days now. John comes in occasionally, but doesn't bother him, realising that he does not want to be disturbed. He lets Ryan get his own food when he wants to and looks after the running of the ship. To make sure that Ryan rests, he has even turned off the console in Ryan's cabin.

Ryan spends most of his time with the log-book. He removed it from the desk originally to make sure that John didn't come across it.

He reads over the first entry he made when he brought it back to the cabin.

What I did to Sarah can be justified, of course, in that she could have ruined this project. I had to be sure nothing wrecked it. The fact that we are all safe and aboard is evidence that I took the right precautions—trusting no one outside the group—making sure that everything was done with the utmost secrecy. We kept contact only with the Russian group—about the last outpost of rational humanity that we knew about.

Would I have done it in that way if she had not turned me down in such an unpleasant manner? I don't know. Considering the state of things at the time, I behaved no worse, no less humanely, than anyone else. You had to fight fire with fire. And if it—and certain other things—is on my conscience, at least it isn't on anyone else's conscience. The boys are clean. So is Josephine. So are most of the others...

He sighs as he reads the entry over. He shifts his body in the bunk.

'All right, old chap?'

John has come, as silently as ever, into the cabin. He looks a trifle tired himself.

'I'm fine.' Ryan closes the book quickly. 'Fine. Are you all right?'

'I'm coping very well. I'll let you know if anything crops up.'

'Thanks.'

John leaves. Ryan returns his attention to the log, turning the pages until he comes to a fresh one.

He continues writing: There is no doubt about it. I have blood on my hands. That's probably the reason I've been having bad dreams. Any normal, half-way decent man would. I took it on myself to do, at least. I didn't involve anyone else.

When we hijacked the Albion transport, I had hoped there would be no trouble. Neither would there have been, I think, if the crew had been all English. Incredible! I always knew the Irish were excitable, but that stupid fellow who tried to get the gun from me in mid-air deserved all he got. He must have been Irish. There's no other explanation. I was never a racialist, but one had to admit that there were certain virtues the English have which other races don't share. I suppose that is racialism of a sort. But not the unhealthy sort. I was horrified when I heard that the foreigners in the camps were being starved to death. I would have done something about it if I could. But by that time it had gone too far. Maybe Sarah was right.

Maybe I could have stopped it if I hadn't been so selfish. I always considered myself to be an enlightened man—a liberal man. I was known for it.

He stops again, staring at the wall.

The rot had set in before my day. H-bombs, nuclear radiation, chemical poisoning, insufficient birth control, mismanaged economics, misguided political theories. And then—panic.

And no room for error. Throw a spanner in the works of a society as sophisticated and highly tuned as ours was and—that's it.

Chaos.

They tried to bring simple answers to complicated problems. They looked for messiahs when they should have been looking at the problems. Humanity's old trouble. But this time humanity did for itself.

Absolutely.

It is odd, he thinks, that I will never know how it all turned out.

Just as well, of course, from the point of view of our kids. We left just in time. They were bombing each other to smithereens...

Another few days, he writes, and we wouldn't have made it. I timed it pretty well, all things considered.

*

Ryan had led the party out to London Airport where the big Albion transport was preparing to take off on its bombing mission over Dublin. They were all in military kit for Ryan was posing as a general with his staff.

They had driven straight out on to the runway and were up the steps and into the plane before anyone knew what had happened.

At gunpoint Ryan had told the pilot to take off.

Within quarter of an hour they were heading for Russia...

It had been over the landing strip on the bleak Siberian Plain that the Irishman—he must have been an Irishman—had panicked. How an Irishman had managed to remain under cover without revealing his evident racial characteristics, Ryan would never know.

For two hours Ryan had sat in the co-pilot's seat with his Purdy automatic trained on the pilot while Henry and Masterson looked after the rest of the crew and John Ryan and Uncle Sidney stayed with the families.

Ryan was tired. He felt drained of energy. His body ached and the butt of the gun was slippery with the sweat from his hands. He felt filthy and his flesh was cold. As the Albion came down through the clouds he saw the huge spaceship standing on the launching field. It was surrounded by webs of gantries, like a caged bird of prey, like Prometheus bound.

His attention was on the ship when the Irish pilot leapt from his seat.

'You damned traitor! You disgusting renegade...' The pilot lunged for the gun, screaming at the top of his voice, his face writhing with his hatred and his insanity.

Ryan fell back, pressing the trigger. The Purdy muttered and a stream of tiny explosive bullets hit the pilot all over bit chest and face and his bloody body collapsed on top of Ryan.

Pilotless, the big transport began to shake.

Ryan pushed the body off him and reached up to throw the lever that would put the plane automatically on Emergency Landing Procedure. The plane's rockets fired and the transport juddered as its trajectory was arrested. It began to go down vertically on its rockets.

Ryan wiped the sweat from his lip and then retched. He had smeared the pilot's blood all over his mouth. He cleaned his face with his sleeve, watching as the plane neared the ground, screaming towards the overgrown airstrip to the north of the launching field.

John Ryan put his head into the cabin 'My God! What happened?'

'The pilot just went mad,' Ryan said hoarsely. 'You'd better check everyone's got their safety belts on, John. We're going to make a heavy landing.'

The Albion was close to the ground now, its rockets burning the concrete strip. Ryan buckled his own safety belt.

Five feet above the ground the rockets cut out and the plane belly-flopped on to the concrete.

Shaken, Ryan got out of his seat and stumbled into the crew section. Alexander was crying and Tracey Masterson was screaming and Ida Henry was moaning, but the rest were very quiet.

'John,' Ryan said. 'Get the doors open and get everybody out of the plane as soon as possible will you?' He still held the Purdy.

John Ryan nodded and Ryan went aft to where Masterson and Henry were covering the rest of the crew.

'What was all that about?' James Henry said suspiciously. 'You trying to kill us all, Ryan?'

The pilot lost his head. We had to make an emergency rocketpowered landing—vertical.' Ryan looked over the rest of the crew—four boys and a woman of about thirty. They all looked scared. 'Did you know your captain was Irish?' Ryan asked them. 'And you were going to bomb Dublin? You can bet your life he was going to try and make a landing.'

The crew stared at him incredulously.

'Well, it was true,' Ryan said. 'But don't worry. I've dealt with him.'

The woman said: 'You murdered him. Is that what you did?'

'Self-defence,' said Ryan. 'Self-defence isn't murder. All right, Fred—Henry—you go and help everybody get off this bloody plane.'

The woman said: 'He was no more Irish than I am. Anyway, what does it matter?"

'No wonder your people are losing,' Ryan answered contemptuously.

When everyone was off the ship Ryan shot the crew. It was the only safe thing to do. While they were alive there was a chance that they would seize control of the Albion and do something foolish.

Tishchenko was a harried-looking man of about fifty. He gravely shook hands with Ryan and then guided him by the elbow across the barren concrete towards the control buildings. The wind was cold and moaned. Beyond the launching site, the plain stretched in all directions, featureless and green-grey. Ryan's people trudged behind them.

Tishchenko was the man whom Ryan had contacted originally.

The contact had been made through Allard who had been one of the people vainly trying to keep the U. N. together in the last days.

Allard, an old school-friend of Ryan's, had been sent to a Patriot camp not long after he had put Ryan in touch with Tishchenko.

'It is a great pleasure,' said Tishchenko as they entered the building that had been converted to living quarters. It was cold and gloomy. 'And something of an achievement that, in the midst of all this insane xenophobia, a little international group of sane men and women can work together on a project as important as this one.'

He smiled. 'And it's good to be able to look at a woman again, I can tell you.'

Ryan was tired. He nodded, rubbing his eyes. One of the reasons the Russian group had been so eager to deal with his group was because of the number of women he could bring with him.

'You are weary?' Tishchenko said. 'Come.'

He led them up two flights of stairs and showed them their accommodation. Camp beds had been lined around the walls of three rooms. 'It is about the best we can provide,' Tishchenko apologised. 'Amenities are few. Every thing had to go to the ship.'

He went to the window and drew back the blankets that covered it.

There she is.'

They gathered around the window and looked at the spacecraft.

She towered into the sky.

'She has been ready to fly for two years.' Tishchenko shook his head. 'It has taken two years to provision her. The civil war here, and then the Chinese invasion, is what protected us. We were all but forgotten about...'

'Who else is here now?' Ryan asked. 'Just Russians?'

Tishchenko smiled. 'Just two Russians—myself and Lipche. A couple of Americans, a Chinese, two Italians, three Germans, a Frenchman. That's it.'

Ryan drew a deep breath. He felt odd. The shock of the killings, he supposed.

'I'll be back in a few minutes to take you down to dinner,'

Tishchenko told him.

Ryan looked up.'What?'

'Dinner. We all eat together on the floor below.'

'Oh, I see...'

'I couldn't,' said Josephine Ryan. 'I really couldn't...'

'We're not used to it, you see,' said James Henry. 'Our customs —well...'

Tishchenko looked puzzled and very slightly perturbed. 'Well, if you'd like to arrange to bring the food up here, I suppose we can do that... Then perhaps we can meet after meals. You have been in the thick of things, of course. We have been isolated. We haven't really experienced...'

'Yes,' said Ryan, 'it has been very nasty. I'm sorry. Some of our social sicknesses have rather rubbed off on us. Give us a day or two to settle. We'll be all right then, I'm sure.'

'Good,' said Tishchenko.

Ryan watched him leave. He sensed a certain antipathy in the Russian's manner. He hoped there would not be trouble with him.

Russians could not always be trusted. For one moment he wondered if they had been led into a complicated trap. Could this team of scientists just be after the women? Would they dispense with the men now that they had served their purpose?

Ryan pulled himself together. An irrational idea. He would have to watch himself more carefully. He had had no sleep for two nights. Get some rest now, he told himself, and you'll be your old self in the morning.

*

The thirteen English people and the eleven scientists toured the ship.

'It is all completely automatic,' said Schonberg, one of the Germans. He smiled and patted Alexander on the head. 'A child could run it.'

The English party, rested and more relaxed, were in better spirits. Even James Henry, who had been the most suspicious of all, seemed better.

'And your probes proved conclusively that there are two planets in the system capable of supporting human life,' he said to Boulez, the Frenchman.

The French scientist smiled. 'One of them could be Earth. About the same amount of land and sea, very similar ecology. There was bound to be a planet like it somewhere—we were just lucky to discover one this early.'

Buccella, one of the Italians, was taking a strong interest in pointing out certain features of the ship to Janet Ryan.

Typical Italian, thought Ryan.

He glanced at his brother John who was listening carefully as Shan, the Chinese, tried to explain about the regeneration units.

Shan's English was not very good.

*

Back in their own quarters, Ryan asked his brother: 'Did you notice that Italian, Buccella, and Janet together?'

'What do you mean "together"?' John said with a grin.

Ryan shrugged. 'It's your problem.'

The preparations continued swiftly. News came in of massive nuclear bombardments taking place all over the globe. They took to working night and day, resting when they could no longer keep their eyes open. And at length the ship was ready.

Buccella, Shan and Boulez were going on the ship with the others. The rest were staying behind. Their job was to get the ship off the ground. They were taking over the duties of some fifty technicians.

Lift-off day arrived.