The Watch Below (13 page)

"We're very lucky," said the doctor.
"Maybe we were all born to be hanged," said Margaret.
"That's still too close to asphyxiation for comfort," said Dickson.
"Couldn't we be born to die in bed?"
So they went back to working the generator one at a time while the others
stayed in the garden. Then sometime in mid-August Dickson found that
he could pedal for a considerable time without the bulky oxygen tent,
and very soon they did not need oxygen at all. Once again they could
walk the length of the ship without discomfort and they could sleep
without dreaming that they were choking to death. They still had eight
tanks of oxygen and one of acetylene, which had been overlooked in the
general confusion, to hold against possible emergencies.
The doctor's garden was a success.
But for some reason the doctor seemed more angry than pleased when they
tried to praise him. And it was not until after Wallis had asked the
first mate and acting-captain (of the merchant service) to perform the
nuptial ceremony and had been married and excused from generator detail
and the Game for a three-day honeymoon that Wallis discovered the reason
for the doctor's anger. They were alone at the time in Seven, working
on another distillation apparatus, and Wallis had just tried again to
compliment the surgeon lieutenant on the success of his garden.
"I thought it would work," Radford said angrily, "but I didn't think
there was enough time. I thought we would all be dead and on the bottom
by now. Instead we have food and water and air, and we're alive!"
"Is that bad?" said Wallis, smiling.
"It isn't altogether good," said the doctor sharply. "There are
complications when people stay alive. One of them -- well, let's say
that one of our biological clocks has stopped."
"Oh," said Wallis.
"Yes," said the doctor. "It isn't to be mentioned to anyone yet,
you understand. They don't feel very well about it. This isn't the sort
of place to bring a kid into the world. In fact it's about the worst
place I know of for the baby and its mother, and the parents realize
it. You can be sure it wasn't deliberate, but under the circumstances
. . ." He shrugged angrily and bent over the workbench again.
"I understand your feelings," Wallis said seriously. "But you're an even
better doctor, Doctor, than you are a gardener."
"You think you understand," said Radford, who then went on to detail
some of the preparations and problems involved in having a confinement
in the dark, frigid hold of a sunken ship with no medical facilities
except a few rolls of adhesive plaster. It was with great difficulty
that Wallis got him off that subject and onto ideas for improving the
interior of their living quarters and the comfort of the ship generally.
Despite the many odd jobs and major alterations which had to be done,
they still had too much time with nothing at all to do, and there were
times when bordom became such a crushing, smothering weight that it
affected them much as the foul air had done in earlier days. Plainly
the only answer was to increase the scope of the Game. There were many
possibilities now that there was air and they could talk and jog each
other's memories and perform various psychological tricks instead of
lying silent and thinking most of the time. But when Wallis was with
Margaret that night the original subject came up again.
He had brought it up himself, but without mentioning the Dicksons, and
had talked all around the subject, and was beginning to go round again
in his efforts not to say anything which would give offense. After all,
they had been married for just three days -- three "days" and four
sleeping periods to be exact -- and he was on dangerous ground.
"I don't think this is a place to have a baby, either," Margaret said
when he had finally bogged down. "Nobody in their right mind would
consider it for a minute. But there have been times, these past few
days, when neither of us was in his right mind -- at least, I know
I
wasn't. What I mean is, it's going to be very hard not to . . . to . . ."
"Practically impossible," said Wallis softly.
"Yes," she said, and sighed. "But you brought the subject up, you know,
not me. Did you have something, some sort of answer, in mind?"
"Well,'~ said Wallis lightly, "there are always twin, uh, heaps of sacking."
"You
beast
!"
"I was joking," said Wallis quickly.
He felt her body stiffen in his arms and for a long time she lay silent,
then suddenly she relaxed and snuggled close.
"Close that eye," she said, "and kiss me."
The complicated techniques evolved by the Dicksons for getting together
were no longer quite so necessary since the temperature had risen in the
ship until it was uncomfortably cool rather than unbearably cold. Shallow
water and possible warm currents were the probable reason, and there
were periodic increases in temperature, which were undoubtedly caused
by the ebb-tide flowing back from sun-warmed sand or rocks. The ship's
interior had become a relatively comfortable place by mid-September,
with the generator and garden and distillation gear all going well -- so
much so that Dickson volunteered for, and actually took, the first bath.
He did it just to please the doctor, Dickson told everyone, and not
because his best friends were telling him. . . .
Despite the many improvements made in their living quarters and the projects
which Dickson, the doctor, and Wallis were always working on, there was
not enough to do in the ship to keep their minds occupied. They had no
idea where they were, although Wallis thought that they might have drifted
as far south as the coast of France or Spain, and they had not heard a
ship's engines since a month before they had run aground. Their chances
of being detected and rescued were vanishingly small, and it was so as
not to think about this that they played the peculiar mixture of parlor
psychology and medieval inquisition which was the Game.
Apart from the Handbook of Marine Engineering, Part One, and a number of
greasy blueprints there was nothing to read on the ship, so that the Game
had become a method of reading each other a page -- or more accurately,
an hour or a day -- at a time. It would begin by the victim's being
asked to remember all that he or she could regarding a date in his past
chosen at random, which was usually nothing at all, at first. But then
the other four would question the victim closely until some small fact
would be remembered, and they would persist, for days if necessary,
until the memories of that tiny segment of his lifetime were recovered
intact. The process would leave both the victim and interrogators
feeling more worn out than if they had just come off a long stint on
the generator, so that the Game helped them to sleep as well.
Sometimes the memories being sought involved the victim's recounting
conversations he or she had held or had overheard, and on these occasions
he or she was expected to fully describe the people concerned and to do
his or her best at reproducing voices and mannerisms. The interrogators
would have run the victim through the incident so many times that they
would know it as well as the victim did. Very often, too, they would
end by each of them playing the part and performing the actions of one
of the characters in the memory, a memory which a short time previously
the victim had not even known he possessed.
It was no great effort to remember the dramatic incident's in one's life,
so the main interest and fun of the Game was in bringing up the normal,
ordinary events: such as Dickson's memory of the twelfth of April,
1935, between four and five in the afternoon, when he had arrived home
from school. Margaret had played his mother talking to his father,
the doctor, while Wallis had played his younger brother and Jenny, who
was an extremely good mimic, had been the radio going in the living
room. Sometimes they went over funny or pleasant easy-to-remember
incidents merely for the sake of entertainment. Occasionally the doctor
would get off on his own pet project of trying to make them remember, word
for word, some of the books they had read. They had all considered this
to be impossible, at first, but when Wallis found himself reciting long
sequences from
Alice in Wonderland
they began to have second thoughts.
It was almost frightening how good their memories had become, and how much
the Game had come to mean to them.
December came and the water lost the last of its stored summer heat.
With
Alice
complete the doctor was digging happily into the minds of
Dickson and Wallis for
Julius Caesar
, in which they both had had parts
when they were at school. Meanwhile they were simultaneously squeezing
Madame Butterfly out of Margaret. It was also the time when, in the
words of Dickson, his wife was more beautiful than ever but definitely
pear-shaped, and it was the time when the second biological clock stopped.
When Wallis told him about it the doctor swore horribly and would not
speak to anyone for the rest of the day.
XIV
"There is absolutely no reason for you to worry," said Hellahar, when
they were alone together between examinations. The healer went on,
"You must know, sir, that the ship has all the necessary medical and
surgical resources, in this field especially. After all, the fleet is
basically a colonization project, even though there will be no mother
world when the colony is planted, and the medical problems attached to
giving birth have received special attention."
"I know," said Deslann.
"There is also the fact," Hellahar went on, "which if I were a modest
person I would not mention, that I am an unusually able healer. You must
remember this is a natural, if rather painful, process and the danger
to the mother and child is minimal."
"I know that, too," said Deslann. "There is no logical reason for my concern,
much less for me to be tying my tail in knots over it. The process has been
going on for millions of years. I've nothing to worry about. But suppose
it was your child about to be born instead of mine, what then?"
"When that time comes," the healer replied gravely, "I would appreciate
it if you would tell me all the things I'm now telling you, and try just
as hard to make me believe them. . . ."
On Gulf Trader there was ability and knowledge but the medical resources
were practically nonexistent. There wasn't even an adequate supply of hot
water. What little there was had been produced by Wallis inserting the
flame of the oxyacetylene welder into buckets of sea water (the garden
was doing so well that they could afford to burn a little oxygen) and
holding it there until the water boiled. But mostly he worked on the
generator. In fact, all, with the exception of the expectant mother and
the doctor, worked on the generator longer and harder than they had ever
done before. They desperately needed the light.
It was a long and difficult confinement, Radford admitted later, although
at the time and to Jenny he swore himself blind that everything was in
all respects normal. But their troubles were not over even when the baby
was finally detached from its mother and had had the soles of her feet
slapped until she complained loudly about it. In the special crib they had
rigged, which was kept warm with improvised hot-water bottles and heated
further (and almost burned in places) by Wallis waving his acetylene
torch along the blankets, the baby started to turn blue and had to be
given oxygen. They had to use one of the tanks from the welder and in the
confusion nearly gave it acetylene by mistake. By the time the baby was
taken care of, its mother needed oxygen as well and was going into shock.
She was so slow to respond that that night Dickson and Margaret slept on
either side of Jenny with their arms around her and their bodies pressed
close to give her warmth. It was the doctor's suggestion, and if Dickson
thought of making any cracks about sleeping with two women at the same
time, for once he kept them to himself.
Much later, when Jenny and her baby were as comfortable as circumstances
permitted and Wallis and the doctor were sitting shivering in the darkness
a short distance away, an odd, low-voiced conversation started up. The
surgeon lieutenant seemed to be afflicted with a fit of the verbal shakes
and could not stop talking, while Wallis tried to thank and compliment
him for what he had done. But he was so cold and tense himself that he
did not make a very good job of it.
"You were very good, Doctor," he said quickly, during a break.
"I . . . I was surprised how . . . how messy it was. I had no idea . . ."
"Of course not," said Radford. "Wouldn't expect it. But there's nothing
for you to worry about. Except that you might ask Margaret to think about
kangaroos. She designed these coveralls and they're very good. Papoose
carriers, I mean. And slung in front instead of at the back. For ease
of feeding, you understand, as well as warmth. The place is too damned
cold to leave a baby lying around. And we'll have to excuse Jenny from
the generator for a while. Margaret, too, she's getting heavy. Any twins
in your family?"
"No," said Wallis, "but . . ."
"Don't worry, anyway," said the doctor. "This was a bad one, it would
have been tricky even in a hospital. Yours should come much more easily.
Especially as we have a better idea of the drill, now. Don't worry,
the next one will be comparatively easy."
"You sound," said Wallis, "as if you're looking forward to it."
Radford was silent for a long time, but when he spoke again his tone
and manner were back to normal. He said, "I didn't mean to give that
impression, sir. If I did it's because I've been hanging on to my
bedside manner for so long that I've forgotten to let go even with
you. But this has been a difficult birth, so much so that your wife
would have to be very unfortunate indeed to have one as bad. This is
fact based on examination and what medical history there is available,
not just a pep-talk for a worried parent-to-be. And in any event I will
do everything possible to -- "
"We know you will, Doctor," said Wallis. "Believe me, we're not worried
about