Obeying Brandyholm’s gesture, Carappa also looked in.
‘How do we get in without disturbing him? It’s hopeless,’ Brandyholm said.
‘The human predicament apart,’ said the priest decisively, ‘Nothing is hopeless. Obviously, we must use guile. It is against my principles, but we must use guile. We must get in under pretence of friendship; once we’re in, he’s ours. Leave it to me.’
With that, he hammered on the thick glass before him. Crooner looked up, and climbed slowly out of his hammock; he still wore his heavy space suit, although he had removed his helmet. Carappa made frantic and unmistakeable signs towards the airlock. Crooner nodded.
‘Gullible fool!’ the priest exclaimed with relish.
VI
They were in the air lock when Crooner’s voice, from a speaker overhead, said, ‘What on earth are you two doing outside the ship?’
‘We managed to escape just after you did.’
‘How did you find your way here?’
‘We’ll give you the details when we get inside,’ Carappa retorted, holding the stolen dazer ready and winking at Brandyholm.
Air sighed in about them, double doors began slowly to open, Carappa moved forward, and a steel bar descended sharply onto the barrel of the dazer, sending it flying from Carappa’s grasp. Then Crooner appeared from behind the lock doors, the bar in one hand, and in the other a sharp and dangerous looking weapon they did not recognise; it pointed without waver at the priest’s heart.
‘Come out,’ Crooner said grimly, his face as lined and motionless as a tree trunk. ‘There’s no room for a scuffle in here. If I so much as suspect you of being about to rush me, I shall shoot you dead with this revolver.’
‘Bob, Bob,’ Carappa said, trying to force a note of reproach into his voice, ‘Why turn on your old friends like this? We mean you no harm. As a priest I’m bound to say – ’
‘Say nothing, Carappa. From your point of view it is unfortunate that these ship’s suit radios were so devised that unwary novices could not shut themselves off from contact with each other – they’re always at Transmit. In other words, I’ve heard every word you both said since you put the suits on. You always talked too much, Carappa, it’s a sort of poetic justice.’
‘Justice!’ Carappa growled, ‘I loathe its very name. Shoot me if you must, but don’t babble of justice!’
These words came indistinctly to Brandyholm. Uncertainty, danger and fear were having a cumulative effect on him. A kind of palsy took him, and without warning he collapsed. Crooner let him fall.
When Brandyholm’s brain cleared and he opened his eyes again, he was lying prone on the floor. Crooner stood over him. He could see enough of Carappa to observe that the big priest now had his hands lashed firmly behind his back. The two were talking, and did not notice Brandyholm’s recovery.
‘I don’t understand,’ the priest was saying – words rarely heard on his lips – ‘You are not an alien or you are? Which?’
‘The term “alien” is subjective,’ Crooner said patiently. ‘As I say, I am from Earth, just as your ancestors were, generations ago. Earth is only a couple of thousand miles away – you saw it outside, a gleaming crescent.’
‘Then the ship got back after all?’
‘The ship got back after all. Yes. It was watched for and sighted long before it reached the skirts of the solar system. When it radiated answers to Earth’s signals, a fast pilot was sent out with a boarding party. The party found the ship’s controls partially ruined, but managed to pull it into an orbit round Earth. That was three of your generations ago. They then completely destroyed the controls – you say you saw their wreckage – and left the ship.’
‘But why, why – ’ Carappa sounded as if he were choking, ‘ – what form of warped cruelty made you leave us there? You could see how things were – all out of hand, death stalking us, the ponic tangle threatening to overwhelm us …’
His voice died. He saw too vividly the heroism of that terrible flight across the light years and back. The survivors, if only for the sake of the generations who had died, should have been saved and honoured.
‘Why were we left?’ Carappa asked brokenly.
‘There was a reason,’ Crooner said. His voice, suddenly full of compassion, became lost on Brandyholm for a moment. Brandyholm’s eye, when he turned his head only slightly on the hard floor, rested on an object he could not at first identify. With a shock, he realised it was the priest’s dazer, about a foot from his face. When Crooner knocked it flying, it had wedged between two cased pieces of equipment and he had not bothered to retrieve it. Brandyholm had only to lift his hand to grasp it.
‘… Procyon V was the only possible planet,’ Crooner was saying. ‘And surface gravity there was one and a half Gs. So there was not as much trouble as had been feared to get volunteers to start the home run. As I’ve said, the outer journey nearly ended in famine and asphyxiation. But they took off again with a stock of new carbohydrates and amino acids. That was where the trouble began. And it began almost at once, as far as we can tell.
‘Giantism began in the hydroponic tanks. It spread rapidly. A virus-borne infection swept through the crew like wild fire. Few died, but almost all were prostrated for weeks. When they recovered strength, the ship was rapidly becoming as you know it – bulging from stem to stern with the giant hydroponics, ponics as you call them.
‘You might almost suspect them of possessing intelligence, so rapidly did they adapt. Low gravity had suddenly given them a tremendous fillip. They destroyed everything, they created their own humus, partly by a rapid fruition cycle, partly by an almost symbiotic use of tiny insects, whose bodies paved the way for further growth.
‘The people of the ship lived in isolated groups among this entanglement. And they too changed. Some of the domestic animals – the ship’s piggery for instance – escaped the tangle and became wild. Others died. Soon almost the only source of food was the ponics themselves. And then men, too, began to speed up. Their life expectation eventually became not eighty years, but twenty.’
‘You mean – you live four times as long as we in the ship?’ said Carappa.
‘It is so. Which is why I always appeared slow to you. Which is why, too, one sleep-wake in four was dim. You see – ’
‘Yes, I see,’ Carappa said. ‘The daily six-hour dim-down of lighting,’ he quoted. ‘Six hours has become a whole day to us! We thought we were human beings, and we’re not. We’re – monsters, pigmies, things out of order, mechanical toys which flail their arms and legs too fast …’
He broke off, subsiding into mountainous sobs which were more impressive than his spoken outburst. Unable to raise his hands to his face, he sat shaking with internal strife while the tears burst down his crumpled countenance.
The sight roused Brandyholm to action. With one continuous, flowing movement, he seized the dazer and was on his feet. Fast as he was, Crooner could have shot him before he was on his knees: but a fatal hesitancy delayed the Earthman, a sense of compunction the others would neither have understood nor appreciated, and next moment he dropped the gun and nursed his paralysed arm to his side.
Brandyholm blew on his warm dazer triumphantly; he felt better again, more a man. The effect of the action on Carappa, too, was swift. His tears dried and he was again in command.
‘Expansion to your ego, Tom,’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t guess you had it in you! Come and undo me quickly, and we’ll settle for this fellow.’