Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The sound of a woman’s voice raised in anger was followed by a man’s hoarse sobbing and an irregular clamour of footsteps. Surgenor ran to the door of his own room, threw it open and saw Billy Narvik and Christine Holmes locked together in struggle a short distance along the corridor. Her blouse had been partially torn open and her face was haggard with fury. Narvik, who was grappling with her from behind, had a dark stain around his mouth and his eyes showed only the whites beneath tremulant lids. His face was ecstatic.

“Let go of her, Billy,” Surgenor ordered. “You know this isn’t a good idea.”

“I can handle this little tick,” Christine said in a bitter monotone. She was kicking back at Narvik’s shins, her heel connecting solidly every time, but he appeared not to notice. Surgenor moved in close, caught hold of Narvik’s wrists and tried to force them apart.

Suddenly aware of a third presence, Narvik widened his eyes and the lines of his face altered as he saw Surgenor. “Stay out of this, big Dave,” he panted. “I want this, and I’ve got to…There’s nothing else left.”

Christine renewed her struggles to break free as Surgenor increased the outward pull on Narvik’s wrists. The smaller man was surprisingly strong and to break his hold Surgenor had to bend his own knees and lower himself into a position from which he could exert maximum effort. This brought his face almost into contact with Christine’s and he felt the pressure of her hips against his as the unnatural intimacy was prolonged. The trio remained in a strained equilibrium for several seconds, then Narvik’s arms began to weaken.

“Dave, Dave!” Narvik began a conspiratorial pleading as his grip was finally broken. “You don’t understand, man—it’s years since I’ve managed to…’

He fell silent as Christine ducked out of the cincture of arms, spun round and in the same movement struck him a loose-fingered blow across the mouth. Surgenor released Narvik’s wrists, allowing him to shrink away against the curving wall of the corridor. Narvik pressed the back of a hand to his lips and gazed accusingly from Surgenor to Christine.

“I get it! I get it’ Narvik gave a quavering laugh. “But it’s only for two hours. What use is two hours to anybody?” He walked away in the direction of the companionway, moving with an incongruously dignified gait.

“You shouldn’t have hit him,” Surgenor said. “You can tell he’s been chewing some kind of weed.”

“That makes rape all right, does it?” Christine began fastening her blouse.

“I didn’t say that,” Surgenor stared at her in frustration, obscurely angry because she had remained as she was, because she had failed to metamorphose in some indefinable way which would have helped him to see a purpose in life or meaning in death. It had seemed to him that, with a term of two hours placed on their existence, it was the duty of the crew members to transcend their old selves and thus, if only in token, make the short time that remained worth putting in the scales against the decades they were being denied. He knew it had been a straightforward fear reaction, that his subconscious—in an effort to deny the facts—was setting up spurious short-range goals, but a part of him clung obstinately to the notion, and he still wished that Christine would be what she could be.

“I’m going to my room,” she said. “And this time I’ll make sure the door is locked.”

“It might be better to be with somebody.”

She shook her head. “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”

“Sure.” Surgenor was trying to think of something worth adding when he heard a commotion break out in the mess room below, and felt an abrupt wave-crash of surprise and alarm. Force of habit caused him to sprint to the companionway and half-run, half-slither down it. The group of men who had chosen to drink themselves into oblivion were positioned in different parts of the mess, some of them already stupefied, but all had their eyes fixed on the head of the metal stair which led down to the hangar deck.

Surgenor strode to the stairwell, leaned over the rail and saw Billy Narvik’s body lying on the floor below. It was distorted and deathly still, the only movement being that of two rivulets of blood which were groping their way out from beneath the body like furtive tentacles.

“He was trying to fly,” somebody breathed. “I swear he thought he could fly.”

“That’s one way out,” another man said, “but I think I’ll wait.”

Surgenor went on down the stair and knelt beside Narvik’s body, confirming what he already knew. The Sarafand’s induced gravity system did not produce a full 1G of acceleration in a falling body, but the impact on the metal floor had been enough to break Narvik’s neck. Surgenor looked about him at the survey modules in their stalls, then up at the faces visible at the top of the stairwell.

“Will somebody give me a hand to move him?” he said. “He’s dead.”

“It isn’t worth it,” Burt Schilling replied. “He won’t be there for long anyway.”

The men leaning on the handrail moved away. Surgenor hesitated, knowing that Schilling was right, but unwilling to leave the remains of a human being crumpled on the hangar floor like so much machine shop waste. He took hold of Narvik’s wrists and hauled the body towards the store room which was built into the massive column forming the ship’s spine. As he opened the door, lights came on automatically. He espied the circular alloy plate, flush mounted in the floor, scribed with radial lines which marked the ship’s centre of gravity and major axes for the benefit of structures teams. In his state of mind it seemed to have an appropriately symbolic or ceremonial appearance. He dragged the body on to it and left the store room, closing the door behind him.

“Hear these words, Aesop,” he said.

“I’m listening to you, David.” The voice emanated from the dimness all round.

“Billy Narvik fell down the stair to the hangar deck a couple of minutes ago. I’ve examined him—and he’s dead. I’ve put the body in the hangar deck tool store, and I’m requesting you to keep that door locked.”

“If that is what you want, I have no objection.” There followed the faint sound of solenoid bolts slipping into place, directed from Aesop’s central units far above.

Surgenor went back upstairs and, ignoring several offers of drinks, passed through the mess and climbed to the deck above. He found Christine standing at the top of the steps, smoking a cigarette, one hip casually upthrust as if she was posing for a dude ranch photograph. Again, he felt an irrational anger.

“Did you hear all that?” he said, keeping his voice calm.

“Most of it.” She eyed him impassively through a filigree of smoke.

“You won’t have to worry about Billy Narvik again.”

“I wasn’t worried about him in the first place.”

“Bully for you.” Surgenor slipped past her, went to his room and locked the door. He threw himself on the bed and at once his mind was drawn back into the whirlpool of confused speculation.

The ultimate jackpot, he knew, eventually came up for everybody—and in rare moments of spiritual malaise he had tried to predict how his own turn might come about. Life in the Cartographical Service was not particularly hazardous, but it offered a great deal of variety, a multitude of ways for the wheels of chance to judder to a halt and lock on to the combination which signified the end of the game for yet another player. He had visualized freakish mechanical failures in his survey module, the risks of contracting exotic diseases, the ironic possibility that he might become a traffic casualty back on Earth—but not even in nightmare had he foreseen anything like the prospect which now lay before him.

After his initial talk with Mike Targett, he had retired to his room and had conferred privately with Aesop. In the churchly solitude, free from the distractions the other crew members would have created, he had been able to absorb the news that Aseop was establishing a set of physical laws for the inverted microcosm. The laws were few in number, reflecting the paucity of data, but the third one had profound implications. It stated, simply, that the rate of shrinkage of any body within a dwindlar was inversely proportional to its mass.

In specific, practical terms this meant that a sun would take many millions of years to achieve zero dimensions—but that the same fate would overtake a body the size of a spaceship in less that one day. The exponential equations derived by Aesop from successive graviton measurements indicated that at 21.37 the Sarafand and all its crew would cease to exist.

Surgenor stared at the ceiling of his room and tried to comprehend what Aesop had told him.

The clock on his wall recorded a time of 20.02 hours, which meant there were roughly ninety minutes left. It also meant, by Aesop’s reckoning, that the Sarafand—once a metal pyramid eighty metres high—had been reduced to the size of a child’s toy. The proposition that the entire ship was no larger than a paperweight outraged Surgenor’s mind, and the corollary that his own body had been reduced in proportion engendered both terror and disbelief.

There had to be a reasonable limit, he assured himself, to what could be deduced from a couple of astrophysical measurements. After all, what hard facts were there to go on? All right, the light from the stars in the cluster exhibited some degree of blue shift, and Aesop—a computer proven to be fallible by the ship’s very own presence in this part of the universe—said it showed the stars were moving inwards. But did it? Was it not a fact that nobody had ever actually measured the speed of a star or a galaxy, and that the whole conceptual edifice of expanding or contracting systems depended on the interpretation of red or blue shift as a Doppler effect? Had anybody ever proved that interpretation to be correct? Beyond any doubt?

Surgenor gave a numb, humourless smile as he realized he had been driven to pitting his sketchy knowledge of formal astronomy against the awful powers of Aesop’s data banks and processing units. All he had proved was that he was so afraid of what lay ahead that he was beginning to fantasize. The realities of the situation were that he had stayed in the Service too long, that he had travelled too far, that he had run out of time, that it was too late for him to cease being a wilful stranger, that he would never make the real meaningful journeys embarked on by those who remain in one chosen place long enough to know the tilted seasons, that he was totally alone and would be for the rest of his life, that it had all been one ghastly mistake, and that there was no longer any damned thing he could do about it…

The red-glowing digits of the clock continued to flicker, squandering Surgenor’s life, and he watched them in bleak fascination. An occasional raucus laugh or the sound of a glass shattering reached him from the mess room, but their frequency diminished as his vigil wore on and he knew the alcohol was taking effect. Some of the crew had elected to spend their final hour in the observation chamber. The idea of joining them recurred several times, but that would have involved making a decision and implementing it, and the effort seemed too great. A merciful torpor had settled over him, turning his limbs to unfeeling lead, slowing his mental processes to the point at which it took him a full minute to complete a single thought.

I…have…seen…too…many…stars.

The gentle tapping on his door struck Surgenor as being something related to another place and time. He listened to it, uncomprehending, then glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes left. He arose with an effort, walked to the door and fumbled it open. Christine Holmes was standing in the corridor, looking at him with pain-filled, puzzled eyes.

“I think I made a mistake,” she said in a low voice. “It’s all too…’

“You don’t have to say anything. It’s all right.” He opened the door wider, allowing her to walk into the room, then locked it again. When he turned to Christine she was standing in the centre of the room with her back to him, shoulder sagging. He went to her and—somehow knowing right from wrong—picked her up in his arms and placed her gently on the bed. Her gaze remained fixed on him as he brushed traces of cigarette ash from her blouse and slacks, then lay down beside her, cradling her head in his left arm. He kissed her once, very lightly, asexually, before lowering his head on to the pillow. She slid her knee forward to rest on his thigh, and a stillness descended on the room.

Fifteen minutes left.

Christine raised her head to look at him, and now he found it difficult to see any trace of hardness in her face. “I never told you,” she said. “My son died just before he was born. It was at a construction camp on Newhome. The doctor was away. I could feel the baby dying, but I couldn’t help him. He was right there inside me, and there was nothing I could do to help him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. I never tell anybody, you see. I was never able to talk about it.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Chris.” He drew her head back down on to his shoulder.

“If I’d only stayed at home. If I’d only waited for Martin at home.”

“You weren’t to know.” Surgenor uttered the age-old commonplace, the ritual absolution, with no trace of embarrassment, in the full understanding that the uniqueness of every human being and every human circumstance infused the words with new meaning. “Try not to think about it.”

Don’t sadden yourself by dwelling on past misfortunes, he thought. Not now.

Ten minutes left.

“Martin never forgave me. He died in a tunnel collapse, but that was four years after we’d split up. So I told you a lie this morning, Dave. I didn’t have a husband who died—he dumped me because of what I’d done, then he died years later. On his own. Unilaterally, you might say.”

This morning? Surgenor was momentarily baffled. What’s she talking about? He cast his mind back over recent events and felt a dull amazement when he realized that less than a day had elapsed since he had strolled out of the Service hostel on a blue-domed, glitter-bright morning—on a planet which was thirty million light-years away. I’m caught in a squeeze play—between macro and micro. And what happens when the diameter of my pupils is less than the wavelength of light?

Five minutes left.

“You wouldn’t have done that, would you, Dave? You wouldn’t have handed me all the blame.”

“There’s no blame Chris—believe me.” To prevent the words being nothing more than words, Surgenor tightened his arm around Christine and felt her move in closer against him. It’s not as bad as it was, he thought in wonderment. It helps when you have somebody…

No minutes left.

No seconds.

No time at all.

The first sound in the new existence was a chiming of bells.

It was followed by Aesop’s voice making a general announcement. “…there is nothing outside. The ship and all its systems are undamaged, but there is nothing outside. There are no stars, no galaxies, no detectable radiation of any kind—nothing but blackness. “It appears that we have an entire continuum to ourselves.”