Lifeboat Read online

  “Survive?” said the Captain. “Oh yes, I had forgotten how you humans, having no knowledge of the Way and its Portals, shrink and scurry from the thought of Passing. But that is your affair. My duty was only that of delivery—dive or dead are all one to me.”

  “They are not to me,” said Giles. “I have a responsibility to keep these of my own race alive. I ask you to pilot us instead to 20B40.”

  “No,” said the Captain. She closed her eyes as if she was very tired. “I can afford no more departures from the Way.”

  “Captain,” said Giles, slowly. “I am of the house and sept of Steel, and Steel has great wealth, part of which I command personally. If you will turn aside to 20B-40 I will give you my promise—and the promise of an Adelborn is a contract signed—to either pay you whatever is necessary to build you another ship just like the one you lost, or pay to actually have it built by your own people first, and then present it to you. You will have lost nothing, then.”

  The Captain opened her eyes and looked at him for a second. “But I will have lost,” she said. “You are an alien and do not understand. All my crew and officers, now that the Engineer has Passed, won death in the destruction of my ship. To have the ship alone replaced is a hollow thing. It would pleasure me only; but it would be an insult to the honors of my crew and officers who have now gone through the further Portal, if I were to accept something they could not share and which did them no honor.”

  She stopped speaking. Giles stood without moving, staring down at her, momentarily without recourse. His offer to her had been the equivalent of holding out a fortune to a pauper. In all his plans for this moment it had never occurred to him that this last and greatest possible price would be refused.

  “You are right, Captain,” he said, slowly. “I do not understand. But I would like to. Perhaps if I understood, there might be some way we could come to other understandings. Can you not explain matters to me so I will comprehend?”

  “No,” said the Captain. “There is no responsibility upon me to make you understand, and none upon you to understand.”

  “I fail to agree with you,” said Giles. “For a long time now I have believed that the Albenareth and humanity are bound together in more ways than just those of trade and shipping. There is not only a duty but a need on us to understand each other, as individuals and as members of our respective races.”

  “Your opinion is of no consequence,” said the Captain. “What you believe is not even possible. You are not of the Albenareth, which is to say you are not of The People. Therefore you would never be able to understand the ways of The People, no matter what efforts I or any other should make to bring you to understanding.”

  “I think,” said Giles, “That what you have just said is not true. I think it is an opinion of yours, only, and that it is that opinion which is wrong, not my own. I ask only that you try.”

  “No,” said the Captain. “To try any such thing would take strength. My strength is now limited. I will not waste it on useless effort.”

  “It is not useless,” said Giles. “It is vital to you and your honor. It is vital to me and my honor. It is vital to the lives of my arbites. It is vital to your race and mine, who may both go down into extinction unless some closer understanding can be found.”

  The Captain closed her eyes again.

  “This matter is no longer discussible,” she said. “On what other subjects did you wish to speak to me?”

  Giles opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  “There is more ib vine and fruit of the vine than is needed for as small a party, such as we are presently in this lifeship,” he said. “At the time of the Engineers passing, the lights were turned down to a less bright mode. It would be a great help to my people in enduring this voyage if the lights could be turned down at regular intervals for short periods. Surely the ib vine can supply us with sufficient nourishment in spite of short periods of lessened illumination.”

  “The light must remain constant,” said the Captain, without opening her eyes. “All things must remain as they are until we reach our appointed destination. Now, Adelman, I am weary of talking and wish privacy.”

  “Very well,” said Giles. “I will talk no more with you—now.”

  He turned and went back to his cot. He sat down on it, his mind whirling. There had to be a way to make the Captain change their destination to the mining colony on the nearer world. He became aware suddenly that Hem was seated on his own cot, silently watching.

  “Don’t just sit here!” said Giles, irritated by the big bumper’s silent stare. “Do something with yourself. Go back and talk to some of the others. They’re never going to include you in things as long as you hide off by yourself this way!”

  Without a word, Hem got up and stepped back through the gap in the screen into the middle section of the ship where most of the other arbites were.

  “And the rest of you back in there!” added Giles, raising his voice. “Hem’s one of you on board here, and I want you to react to him the same way you would to any of the rest of you! Remember that!”

  A corner of his mind nibbled at him with small teeth, reminding him that he was taking out his own frustration with the Captain on the arbites, who dared not frustrate him in anything. But he forced himself to ignore the thought He stretched out on the cot and threw a forearm across his eyes to shut out the never-ending ceiling illumination. Maybe if he slept on the problem he could come up with some idea for changing the Captain’s mind.

  He woke some time later. There were no arbite voices in conversation sounding beyond the screen next to his cot, but he had the impression that something, some noise, had wakened him. He listened, but all he could hear was the faintest of sounds— almost a sort of struggling-to-breathe sound.

  He sat up silently and swung his legs over the end of his cot From this position he could see through the gap in the near screen to the cots of the middle section. Each one was occupied by a sleeping figure, but it was from none of them that the faint sound was coming—nor was it from beyond the further screen, where Di and Frenco would be.

  Puzzled, Giles sat listening. Slowly, his hearing began to get a directional fix on the sound. It came from close by. In fact, it came from the cot across the center aisle from him, the only cot besides his own pulled into up position in the front part of the lifeship.

  Hem was sleeping there, lying on his side with his clenched fists up in front of his face, his heavy body curled up on the long but narrow cot. Or was the bumper actually asleep? Silently, Giles got to his feet and stepped over to stand by the head of Hem’s cot.

  The big arbite was crying—in all but perfect silence. His two heavy fists were hiding his face and somehow he had managed to pull loose enough of the fabric covering his cot to stuff into his mouth and muffle the sounds he was making. He lay there on his side, his mouth hidden by the fists and the fabric, and the tears running down from his tightly shut eyes.

  Giles frowned.

  “Hem,” he said softly.

  The bumper did not respond.

  “Hem!” Giles said again, no more loudly, but with more tension in his voice. Hem’s eyes flew open and stared up at Giles in what might be either astonishment or panic.

  “Hem, what’s wrong?” Giles asked.

  Hem shook his head, tears still rolling down his cheeks.

  Giles gazed down at him for a moment, perplexed. Then Giles sat down on the floor beside the cot, so that his lips were close to the arbite’s ear and he could talk very quietly indeed.

  “All right, Hem,” he said, softly. “Now you can tell me what’s wrong.”

  Again, Hem shook his head.

  “Yes, you can,” Giles went on, keeping his voice gentle but insistent. “Something’s bothering you. What is it, now?”

  Hem struggled with himself and finally lifted the muffling fabric from his mouth long enough to say one, almost inaudible, Word.

  “Nothing ...”

  “It can’t be ‘not
hing,’ “ said Giles. “Look at you. Now tell me, what is it that’s troubling you? Or who is it? Answer me.”

  “I’m sick,” whispered Hem.

  “Sick? How? What kind of sickness?”

  But Hem had the fabric back in his mouth and was saying nothing.

  “Hem,” said Giles, still gently, “when I ask you a question, I want you to answer me. Where do you feel sick—in your stomach?”

  Hem shook his head.

  “Where? In your arm or leg? In your head?”

  Hem shook his head to all these suggestions.

  “What kind of sickness is it?” demanded Giles. “Do you hurt someplace?”

  Hem shook his head. Then he closed his eyes and nodded. His tears began to flow heavily again.

  “Well, where, then?” Giles asked.

  Hem shuddered. Still keeping his eyes closed, he took the fabric from his mouth.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “ ‘Yes’ ... what? What hurts? Your head—arms—legs? Where?”

  Hem only shook his head silently. Giles checked his temper, which was threatening to rise. It was not Hem’s fault he could not express himself. The responsibility to find words for what was wrong with the big bumper lay not with the arbite who had only a limited vocabulary, but the Adelman who could express himself.

  “Tell me if you can, Hem,” said Giles. “Just when did you start to feel bad? Was it just after we got into the lifeship? Or just a few hours ago? Or did you feel bad when you were back on the big spaceship?”

  Then, at last, it began to come out, in bits and pieces of disjointed sentences. Hem, it seemed, was the exception to what Mara had claimed for all the arbites. The last thing in the world Hem had wanted was to be indent to one of the outer worlds. The reason for this, Giles became aware, had much to do with the status and purpose of Hem’s own life back on Earth, a status and purpose Giles had known about all his life but had never appreciated until this moment.

  The heavy-duty arbites, those males specially bred to the few hard physical tasks that remained, were essentially a culture apart from the rest of the working class. To keep them from becoming discontented with the relatively simple, repetitive tasks they had to do, they were gene-controlled for a low intelligence, level and for those factors that would encourage a feeling of docility and dependence upon their superiors. Theoretically, they were as free as the other arbites. Once in a while, one of them succeeded in leaving the work barracks and setting up a permanent family relationship with some normal arbite woman, but this was uncommon.

  For all the strength in their oversize bodies, they were timid socially. Most of them lived out their relatively short lives—for some reason they were more than normally vulnerable to diseases, especially pneumonia, and few of them in the barracks lived beyond their middle thirties—almost exclusively in the company of their work mates.

  Hem had been like the rest. To him, the barracks had been the whole world, and his beer-mate, Jase, the closest tiling to any kind of family he knew. Conceived, essentially, in a test tube, raised in a nursery reserved exclusively for low-intelligence boys like himself, and graduated to the work barracks at the early maturity of thirteen years of age, Hem had been in no way prepared psychologically to be tom from the only way of life he knew and sent light-years away with no company but that of the superior arbites who had little in common with him. Everything that Hem knew had been taken from him. He would never again have a barracksful of old friends to return to. He would never again know the friendly drinking and the equally friendly brawls of the beer-busts, the jokes, the tricks, the pleasure of working in company with his mates. Above all, he would never see Jase again.

  It was a little while before Giles began to put together the incoherent and broken whispers of the big man. What he heard opened his eyes to the fallacy of a great many comforting beliefs he, like everyone else, had always accepted about this lowest class of arbites, without ever stopping to examine them. Those of Hem’s special type were supposed to be incorrigibly cheerful because of their ignorance, automatically brave because they did not have the intelligence to know the meaning of fear, and totally unselfconscious because their size and strength made them indifferent to the opinions of the weaker, but more intelligent humans around them.

  None of this was true, he now learned. But the discovery still left him puzzled. Something more than just the difference between his actual nature and the way others thought of him was chewing at Hem. Giles kept after the arbite with gentle, but prodding questions and finally, in the same fragmentary fashion in which Hem had expressed himself about other things, the deeper problem came out.

  The important thing for Hem had been his work-mate, Jase. Whether the relationship Hem was trying to describe had been a homosexual one or not hardly mattered in the childlike terms of which Hem thought of such things. The important point was that nobody had loved Hem—mother, father, sibling, or girlfriend. Only Jase. And Hem had returned that affection. For twelve years of barracks life they had been beer-mates, which in essence meant they did their after-hours drinking always in each other’s company.

  Then suddenly Hem was taken away, to be shipped to some strange colony on a different world, where it was doubtful that there would be even one other laboring-class arbite for him to talk to. He could not even write Jase—not because he was illiterate, but because it was too much of a creative demand for someone like himself to make a letter anything but an emotionless vehicle for the simplest sort of factual information.

  So, suffering under this loss, with his grief completely unsuspected by everyone around him, including his so-called fellow arbites, Hem had stumbled even deeper into emotional trouble. He had no name for the new pain within him; he could not even consciously connect with its cause—but Giles, eking the information out of him bit by unhappy bit, came to understand what Hem could not admit, even to himself.

  Simply, it was that Hem, robbed of Jase, had needed desperately to find someone else to fasten his affections upon. And unconsciously, he had fastened them finally on Giles. Giles, alone among the aliens and upper-caste arbites that now surrounded Hem, showed some of the size, the strength, the characteristics that Hem associated with his own mates.

  And the big arbite’s reaction was not so much to wonder at, at that, thought Giles silently. He contrasted his own early days in boarding school with Hem’s. He and the bumper had been at opposite ends of the social spectrum; but in both cases the irresistible hand of custom and authority had picked them up, molded them, and determined the life they would lead while they were still too young to know what was being done to them. They were equally damned—no, thought Giles, Hem was the better of the two in one respect. He had been left with the freedom to love—even if it was only one of his mates. Giles had had as close a friendship with Paul Oca as perhaps he had ever had with any other man, but it could not really be said that they were “mates,” even in the ordinary, work meaning of that word in Hem’s barracks.

  As for girls ... women, it came to Giles suddenly that he had given nothing worthwhile in any of his brief liaisons, and had been scrupulously careful to take nothing. For the first time it occurred to him that no one had ever loved him, and he also had really never loved anyone. His own parents had been there in the flesh, but removed from him across barriers of age and manners. His brothers and sisters, if he had ever had any, would have been brought up apart from him to become polite strangers. He did not miss this lack of an affection that was one of the necessary ingredients of life itself to Hem; but he was not unaware of its existence. For him, love was duty, and duty love. That was as far as his emotions would go—and he could see no hope of there ever being anything more for him.

  His thoughts came back to Hem. Unconsciously, Hem had taken hold of one of Giles’ hands in his own two big fists and was holding it, weeping over it in the depths of his voiceless unhappiness. Hem, Giles realized, would never be able to understand why he was suffering. The perhaps lucky thing about H
em’s affection for Giles was that while the bumper felt it, he was completely incapable of acknowledging it. The very suggestion that he might dream of someone like an Adelman being a “mate” to him in any sense of the word was so far out of context with life as Hem knew it that he was mercifully protected from entertaining it consciously. The only way he could approach such a thought was in the desperate wish to do something for Giles, something large and terrible, up to the giving of his life for the Adelman. He tried to tell Giles so, in fragmentary phrases.

  “Good,” said Giles. “That’s very good, Hem. I appreciate it Don’t worry. If ever I need you, I’ll call you—right away.”

  “You will?” said Hem.

  “Of course,” said Giles. “Of course. Don’t let it worry you, Hem. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “It is?” Hem relaxed at last. He still cried, but now it was out of relief and gratitude—he could not have said why, any more than he had been able earlier to identify the cause of his unhappiness. He clung to Giles’ hand and wept.

  Giles sat with him patiently for a little while longer, until the bumper dropped off into sleep. Then gently withdrawing his hand, Giles stood up and stretched stiff muscles. He was cramped from sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lifeship. Stretching, he made a mental note to find out, once they made planetfall, where, if at all, there were other heavy-laboring arbites stationed on the Colony Worlds. It would probably be impossible to get Hem returned to Earth, but it should not be beyond the bounds of impossibility to get his indent changed to someplace where he could be with work-mates of his own stamp, if any such place existed on one of the Colony Worlds.

  Meanwhile, Giles lay down again on his own cot and closed his eyes. There must be some means of convincing the Captain to change the lifeship’s course to 20B40. Now that he knew that the World Police also believed Paul was on one of the Colony Worlds, they might have men and women out on those worlds hunting Paul now. Time had become a factor in the assassination. Giles had never anticipated that the alien officer, whoever that might be, in charge of the lifeship would be this stubborn about maintaining course for the spaceship’s original destination.