Lifeboat Read online

  “Good for you,” said Giles. “We’re lucky to have someone like you aboard, Hem, in case we have something to do that takes someone with strength we can rely on.” He ran his gaze deliberately around the faces of the other arbites and saw that they had caught the social implication of his words. A couple of them flushed, and some of the rest looked sourly down at the floor. The girl Mara, however, was not one of them. Clearly they did not like Hem being placed on the same level as themselves, but they would put up with it.

  Giles held the recorder. Esteven came and took it back.

  “All right,” Giles said. “Now, I’m going to talk to the Captain and see what information I can get. All I know at the moment is that either we ran into something or there was an explosion, and we seem to be the only ones who got out of the ship.”

  “Over two hundred people—human people—aboard, two hundred and twelve,” Groce said hoarsely, tapping the figure into his compute as though to make it more real.

  Giles shivered internally, feeling again within him the sharp teeth of conscience.

  “And twelve alien crew members,” he said loudly. “So we’re the lucky ones. Just remember that, if things go badly. These lifeships are meant for survival and are a little short on comforts. You’ve seen how to work the cots. Those ib fruit you see on the vines are what we’ll be eating, after the water has been pressed out of them. They’re three-quarters fluid, so we’ll have more than enough to drink. This plant’s a mutation, gene-designed for this one function. Plenty of protein, so we’re not going to starve.”

  “But, sir, how does it taste?” Di asked. Plainly, she had never eaten anything but prepared commissary food in her life.

  “Is that... it?” the gray-haired woman named Biset asked, sniffing sternly as she pointed in the general direction of the covered pail.

  “I’m afraid it is,” Giles said. “But there should be folding partitions stored in the floor or walls here somewhere. I’ll ask the Captain. We can arrange something for privacy.”

  “Ask him why we went back for that other pruney.” Now that the fear was ebbing away, Groce was beginning to show anger. “We could’ve been killed, all of us!”

  “The Captain had to have a good reason for acting as he did. I’ll ask him what it was. But listen to me, everyone. None of you, obviously, have ever been in space before; but I know you’ll have heard dozens of wild stories about the Albenareth. Forget those stories—now! We’re all dependent on those two aliens up front, there, for our survival. So the term ‘pruney’ isn’t to be used again by any of you. Is that understood? Now, check those cots of yours to see they’re all in working order, and keep your voices down while I go and have a talk with the Captain.”

  Giles had been watching the two Albenareth as he talked. They had taken the starbook from its golden wrapping and placed it in its ritual, jewel-embossed clamp on the control console. Some plates had been removed from the sides of the console and the Engineer was probing delicately in the opening with the whiskerlike prods of an instrument. The Captain sat silently, arms crossed, staring into the emptiness of space. Giles went and stood next to her.

  “I would like to talk to the Rayumung,” he said in buzzing Albenareth. The Captain slowly turned the glistening furrows of her face toward him.

  “You speak our language.”

  “I am of the Steel sept. I go to space because this is what must be done. For the same reason I have learned your tongue. Please tell me what I need to know.”

  “My ship has been destroyed and I could not die with it. We will soon start and proceed to Belben.”

  “Belben?” echoed Giles.

  “Belben,” repeated the Captain.

  “But how long will the voyage take?”

  “I do not yet know exactly. Possibly a hundred ship-days. This small engine lacks efficiency, therefore the Munghanf is unlucky enough to be with us.”

  “It is his sorrow. Is the cause of the accident known?”

  “There was no accident. My ship was destroyed by a deliberately caused explosion.”

  For the first time the Captain showed some sign of emotion, her voice raised, her fingers shaking.

  “It’s not possible,” Giles began.

  “There is no doubt. There were only empty cargo holds at the explosion site. Nor was there anything there that could bum. It would take nothing less than a fusion bomb to ignite the flooring, which bums only at the highest temperature.”

  Giles shifted his weight slightly on his feet “This is a grave charge,” he said. “Why would anyone want to sabotage an Albenareth spacer?”

  “That I do not know. But a crime has been committed.” The dark alien eyes stared directly into Giles’. “A crime one of my race would not commit.”

  “There is no possibility the explosion was only an accident?” said Giles. “Your ship was old, Rayumung. Many of the ships of the Albenareth are very old.”

  “Their age is no matter. It was not an accident” The Captain’s voice was unchanged, but her long, three-fingered hands were now tightly clenched—a sign of deep emotion in an Albenareth, as Giles remembered from his studies of the aliens. He changed the subject.

  “You said it would take possibly a hundred ship-days to reach Belben in this lifeship. Is there no destination closer?”

  “Our destination was Belben. It is still Belben”

  “Surely,” said Giles, “it would be more sensible to go to the closest point where safe planetfall is possible?”

  “I and my officers and my crew have fallen far back on the road to Perfection by permitting the loss of our ship.” The dark eyes turned away from Giles, dismissing him. “My Engineer and I may not even permit ourselves the redemption of death. To fail to reach our planned destination means a further loss of honor, and that is unthinkable. Farewell, therefore. Our talk is ended.”

  Giles’ temper twitched to life. He held it in check, and continued to talk in an even voice.

  “I have not ended speaking, Rayumung,” he said. The Captain turned her head back to face him. “I have a responsibility for the other humans with me on board here. I make a formal request that you look for a closer destination that will shorten our time in this lifeship.”

  The Captain stared at him a moment without speaking.

  “Human,” she said at last, “we permit you to travel aboard our holy ships into holy space because you have no ships of your own worth the counting, and because it is a step upon the Way to assist others, even though they are aliens who will never know the meaning of Perfection. Also the rewards you bring us for carrying you permit more of our people than otherwise could to be unbound from the worlds of their beginnings. But you are only that which we carry of our own choice. You will not speak to me of destinations.”

  Giles opened his mouth to answer, but the Captain’s eyes had already looked past him, and she was talking again.

  “Nor are you aboard this lifeship in such mode as I would prefer,” she said. “You are eight. The number is not optimum.”

  Giles stared at her.

  “I don’t understand the Rayumung,” he said.

  “The number” repeated the Captain, “is not optimum for Perfection in continuing our voyage to Belben. It would be more optimal if you were one less. Perhaps you will reduce your number by one individual.” She pointed to the tank in the back of the lifeship. “The converter could use the additional raw material.”

  Giles stiffened.

  “Murder an arbite, just to suit your idea of Perfection?” he snapped.

  “Why not?” The dark, round eyes stared unblinkingly at him.

  “You use them as slaves, but here in this small ship you have no need for so many slaves. What is one of them compared to the good will of myself, who hold survival of all of you in my hands? Why concern yourself for any of them?”

  A shock like the blow of some icy-bladed ax between his shoulder blades robbed Giles of words. It was several seconds before he could get himself under control enou
gh to speak.

  “They are arbites!” The buzzing Albenareth words lent themselves to being snarled by the human throat, and Giles heard himself snarling them. “They are arbites, and I am an Adelman! An Adelman of a family who have been Adelborn for twenty generations! Put me in the converter, if you think you can, Rayumung. But lay one finger on any of these now under my protection, and I swear to you by the God of my race and the Perfection worshipped by yours that this lifeship will reach no destination at all, and you will die in dishonor, if I have to take the hull plates apart with my bare hands!”

  The Captain loomed over him. The wrinkled alien face, expressionless, was close to his.

  “I suggested only, not commanded,” said the Captain. A rare tone of emotion, of something almost like grim humor, crept into her voice. “But do you redly think you could match yourself against me, human?”

  She turned away. Giles found he was trembling like a dead leaf in the winter gale of his rage. He stood for a second until the shaking stopped, before turning around. It would not do to have the arbites see him otherwise than in perfect control of himself.

  He had let himself react without thinking and the results had nearly been disastrous, to himself as well as to his mission. He should never have lost his temper. True, the destruction of another human being was nowhere near the small thing the Albenareth Captain thought it to be. But theoretically, Giles’ duty was more important than every arbite on this boat, and logic dictated that he should have not hesitated to sacrifice one of them if his mission demanded it. Moreover, no doubt there were many of the other Adelborn in the Oca Front who would never have so hesitated.

  Still, he Knew in his innermost self that if he were to face that same suggestion from the Captain all over again, his reaction would be no different.

  He was a Steel—one of the ancient and honorable family who still lived and worked with the metal that had given them their wealth and rank—unlike Copper or Comsats or Utl, families who long ago had left the sources of their names to the handling of their arbites. The metal, steel, had lifted man on the first steps of his road to civilization. The Eiffel Tower and the San-Fran Bridge still stood as monuments to the lifting. No one of the Steel sept could in honor stand idly by and see a defenseless arbite abused—let alone killed.

  He calmed, inwardly as well as outwardly. There was no question about his duty. He had only to follow his instincts—let live or die who might.

  He turned back at last to the arbites with a face that was composed and even smiling a little.

  4

  3:17 hours

  The panels for the partitions were dry and old like much of the rest of the lifeship parts. Their fabric had tom in Hem’s thick fists as the large arbite pulled them from their niches in the floor of the ship. Giles lay on his cot, watching Groce and Esteven painstakingly gluing the tom edges together with an adhesive film extruded by a tool in the small repair kit the Albenareth Engineer had been able to provide. The two aliens were supplied with a permanent in-place screen behind their seats in the control area, that they needed only to roll down and fasten. They had been out of the sight of their human passengers most of the time since they had done so, and for that bit of screening, particularly, Giles was thankful. The less the arbites saw of the aliens, he reasoned, the more likely they would be to live with the Albenareth in harmony. Once their own screens were repaired and in position, he would set a couple of the women to harvesting the fruit of the ib vine. But for the moment, work space aboard was too crowded, with the panels spread out as they were for repair.

  He transferred his gaze from his fellow passengers to the ceiling of the craft, with its sections of utilitarian gray metal. A far cry from the comforts of his own interplanetary yacht... . His mind drifted off to large problems, the whole of his mission.

  He had saved the warrant, thankfully. Without the warrant, he would have to risk an assassination on a Colony World where the police methods of those there would be unfamiliar. He smiled a little bitterly to himself. Once there had been no need for the Adelborn to kill one another, but Paul Oca had forced the chain of events that now moved to destroy him. If Paul had only-been content to be their namesake, their philosopher, who had set them —all the conscientious young men and women of the Adelborn who had formed the Oca Front six years ago—on the road to cleansing and reawakening the human spirit But some twist in Paul, some instinct to destruction, had pushed him to go one step further to suggest they throw open the doors of the Free Teaching Centers to the arbites, immediately.

  “Are you insane, Paul?” Giles had asked.

  “That’s a ridiculous question,” said Paul coldly.

  “Is it?” said Giles. “You have to know that doing it suddenly would cause chaos—people starving in the streets in the long run, all governmental control broken down and production at a halt Something like that has to be done step by step. Why do you think the world was put under the present social structure by our ancestors? There simply wasn’t room enough or production enough to support the population and the power demands of an emerging technology. There wasn’t any choice. Everybody realized that It was time to stop developing civilization—all the wild growth in population and invention—for as long as it was necessary to get the race on a working basis, supporting itself without draining the planet any further. Now we’ve almost got to the point where theAdelman-arbite differences can be scrapped—and you want to smash everything that’s been achieved by bringing in heaven immediately, fifty years ahead of schedule.”

  “I thought” said Paul—his white, regular features were unmoved from the classic impassivity and coldness of the Adelborn-schooled face—”you adhered to my principles of the Oca Front.”

  “I adhered, and I adhere,” Giles said, “to the principle of what needs to be done. The Oca Front is made up of Adelborn, Paul. Remember that I won’t stand by for one member’s ideas if I think they’re wrong, any more than you would. Even when that member is you. You started the organization, Paul, but you don’t own it. You’re just one of a group that wants to work to bring this two-hundred-year-old, unnatural social structure to an end. If you doubt that, check some of the other members for opinions. You’ll find they don’t like your idea of revolution at this moment any more than I do. It smacks of glory-hunting, wanting to have the skyrockets all go up in your own particular time.”

  “Glory,” said Paul, “hunting?” He made two words of it.

  “I said that,” said Giles, equally deliberately. Only another Adelborn, looking at and listening to the two tall, lean, level-voiced young men, would have realized that they were on the verge of a deadly explosion. “I said that and I meant that. As I say, check with others of the Front You’ll find I’m not alone in my opinion.”

  Paul looked at him for a long second.

  “Giles,” he said, “I’ve doubted your opinion was wise once or twice in the past This now confirms that doubt You fail in your concept of duty, which is everything to us. We’re caretakers for the rest of the race until the situation and their own growth makes them ready to come of age. That duty is paramount If you had it fully in you, you’d understand that it makes no difference if opening the Teaching Centers now causes widespread breakdown, starvation—or any other temporary upheaval. If the time has come, the time has come. But you, Giles, have a flaw. You are— and always were—partly a romantic. You worry about people, not the great shift and flow of human history.”

  “People are history,” said Giles. His tone and attitude were unchanged, but inside himself he was feeling a sort of despair. The flare of anger toward Paul’s unreasonableness which he had felt a moment earlier had quickly burned itself out as quickly as it had sprung up. Adelborn did not have friends, at least in the old sense of the word. As Paul had said, duty was everything. But as far as it could be said there was friendship, Paul had been his oldest and closest friend. Their relationship went back to their first young years in the Academy together. They had been side by side in the
long dining halls, the austere dormitories, the cold classrooms, and the barren sports fields. Together, they had been changed from children who remembered and longed for even the limited family closeness of the Adelborn, to members of a ruling class who knew only that duty Paul talked about, and who needed or wanted nothing and no one else.

  From that time on they had lived, each self-sufficient and isolated within himself, as complete and separate individuals without the weaknesses of any closeness with any other human being. It was necessary that they be so, that corruption and human frailty not be allowed to damage the rigid structure of the survival society that their ancestors had set up, to be maintained until there should be room enough, food enough, and future enough for the race as a whole to be free again.

  As it was, no one was free. In essence, the arbites were slaves to the Adelborn; and the Adelborn were slaves to their duty—to that survival program laid out two centuries before. The Adelborn were not to question that plan until survival for the race was assured, and they were not to permit the arbites to question it.

  All this was true. And perhaps it was true too, as Paul had said, that Giles was a romantic and his sense of duty had a flaw in it But at the same time Paul was wrong about opening the Centers this soon. If he insisted on doing so, the others in the Front would have to stop him—which necessarily would mean destroying him. No Adelborn would turn aside from what he considered a correct action merely because of the weight of opposition, or from any fear of personal consequences. Giles did not want Paul destroyed. He had done too much that was good already. He was too useful to be wasted. Once more, Giles tried to reach the other man by argument.

  “Already the arbite class has bad cracks in it, Paul,” he said. “You know that as well as I do. There’s that Black Thursday group of wild-eyed revolutionaries. There are these gangs that are starting to roam around beating up other arbites for the kick of it Particularly, beating up the laboring arbites, as if they were trophies to be taken—and the other arbites know as well as we do that the laborers are genetically tailored to be harmless outside of the friendly brawling among themselves in their barracks. Finally, there’s the arbite bureaucracy that’s evolved over two centuries while the best of them were becoming a sort of noncommissioned-officer class for Adelborn like us. Stop and think of those three groups, each with its own self-interest or blindness to the Survival Plan you and I have in our very bones. If you could throw open the Teaching Centers tomorrow, do you think the individuals of each of those arbite groups would sit back and wait to let the Plan accomplish itself? You know better. You must know that each one would dive into the chaos caused by relaxation of the social order, to get the biggest possible slice of authority in the future for their own group’s people. They’d tear the arbite class apart, Paul. They’d each pick up adherents and this scarred old world would see war, once more. War in the streets, with each man out to destroy his neighbors!”