The Watch Below (16 page)

Wallis still had doubts, but they disappeared five months later when
the senior Dicksons and Wallises became grandparents twice over within a
matter of minutes. It was a hectic time for everyone, especially for the
doctor and Richard, who delivered two mothers of their babies practically
simultaneously, but they coped very well with this emergency. When a
measure of peace had returned to the tanks, the seniors, who somehow
had found themselves pushed out to the fringes of all the activity,
did some serious talking about Richard.
"Your son is going to be a good doctor one of these days," Margaret Wallis
told Jenny Dickson as they were winding up the discussion. "You don't have
to worry about him from now on. He'll settle down, you'll see."
"Of course he was simply following my lead," said the doctor smugly.
"I admit that the second one arrived five minutes before I even saw it,
but the fact still remains that -- "
". . . He was following your lead," Dickson finished for him, and then
added proudly, "from about twenty yards out in front!"
"A mere technicality," said the doctor. He looked even prouder of Richard
than did his assistant's mother and father.
But Richard did not settle down to anything like the extent they expected
of him, although as a person he became much less obnoxious -- the doctor,
thought Wallis, must have given him some intensive tuition in the bedside
manner. He was plainly unhappy and discontented and kept putting forward
ideas which were stupid or dangerous, or both. One of his more frequent
proposals was for increasing the living space within the ship by opening
a passage to the storage spaces under the bridge deck or to the aft pump
room. In a weak moment Wallis gave him permission to go ahead on this
project, because he was sure that the preparatory work would take such
a long time that Richard would lose interest in it, but in this Wallis
was wrong.
At that time the population of Gulf Trader was eleven, three of whom were
very young children, and the doctor's garden covered two whole tanks. He
had done this to absorb the extra wastes rather than because of a shortage
of oxygen, and the air was so rich in this gas that he was advocating the
burning of certain wastes to bring it down to a more normal level. When
Richard asked if the garden would absorb carbon monoxide as well as the
dioxide, the doctor said that he wasn't sure but he thought it would,
and after that the ideas came thick and fast.
They would use the old generator's petrol engine and a compressor to
refill the empty oxy and acetylene tanks with compressed air. As an extra
precaution they would pipe the engine's exhaust into a tank of sea water
in the garden, and the carbon monoxide which wasn't dissolved in the
water would be absorbed by the plants. With compressed air available they
would pierce the plating between themselves and a likely compartment,
letting the water run out of it while replacing it with air. A lot of
water would collect inside the ship, but there was no danger in this as
they were fast aground and did not have to worry about buoyancy. When
they had emptied the chosen compartment of water they would observe the
rate at which it was refilled from outside leaks, if any, over a period
of several "days" before cutting a way in. Provision would also be made
for sealing the opening quickly in an emergency. And there were other
ideas which could be developed as they went along. . . .
By the time Richard had finished speaking, his brother, Joseph, and Wallis's
son, David, were solidly behind him, and the lieutenant commander was
beginning to wonder if his mind was not, perhaps, becoming a trifle
inelastic in his old age, for he, also, was becoming caught up in
Richard's enthusiasm although previously he had been dead against the
project. But Wallis retained enough common sense to veto Richard's first
choice of what he called the New Country to be opened.
Gulf Trader had gone aground bow first and had settled, since it lay on
a shelving bottom, stern down. Richard's first plan was to drain the
aft pump room. But the volume of water in the pump room was such that
it would have flooded the three sternmost tanks to a depth of anything
up to six feet, quite apart from the fact that it was almost certainly
open to the sea. The second choice Wallis agreed with, after a long
consultation with Dickson Senior.
It was a short length of corridor and two cabins which had been part of
the stokers' living quarters, but which had been stripped to make room
for some communications equipment due to come aboard at Liverpool. The
corridor opened onto the weather deck via a watertight door and was
interrupted by another such door six or seven yards later at a point
for'rard of the companionways leading down to the engine room and up to
the poop deck. When the second torpedo had struck aft there would have
been direct access to the boat deck via the companionways for survivors
from the engine room; the weather deck had been awash, so nobody would
have entered the corridor from that side; and the two cabins were no
longer used by the crew. The chances, therefore, were very good that the
watertight doors had not been opened, and the volume of water contained
in the short stretch of corridor and the two cabins was not excessive.
The project took almost two years.
By way of a dress rehearsal Richard opened a way into the bilges through
one of the modified intercostal spaces. There was an airtight hatch
in the tank floor leading to the space, similar to the one used as a
head, and another airtight cover on the floor of the tiny compartment
underneath it which was not supposed to be opened until the ship was
in drydock. Richard went into this compartment and had it sealed after
him. He used his torch and compressed-air tank and sheer brute strength to
open the lower hatch, and was able to look directly into the water-filled
bilge while the extra air pressure kept the water from flooding up, and
he could see fish swimming about. It was the first time he had seen a
fish, or any living creature other than human beings, and the effect on
him was something he would talk about for years. He replaced the lower
hatch quickly before the light faded completely from his torch -- its
battery had been recharged so many times that it did not hold a charge
for very long -- and tapped to be let out.
They were not able to open the upper hatch slowly enough to avoid a sudden
pressure drop, and Richard had an attack of nosebleed and trouble with
his ears. But he was able to tell them that there was now a place to
dump the growing pile of waste in Number One, as well as any other
undesirable material.
Richard did not say it in so many words, but they all knew that there
was now a place for their bodies to go when they died. . . .
Wallis thought about this useful if somewhat morbid discovery many times
during the long wait for the stokers' cabins to drain, but he forgot it
completely as the last of the water gurgled out of the new territory
and he signaled for the opening to be made. If there should be a sudden
deluge through the opening they would all get a soaking and have to
abandon some useful material, but there would be plenty of time to get
out of Number Twelve and seal it behind them in an emergency. Besides,
Wallis was as impatient now as was Richard to get up there, although
unlike Richard he could not have stated his reasons with any clarity.
A few minutes later they were pushing their way through the opening,
ignoring the scorched hands they received on the still-hot edges. Dickson
Senior, Richard, the doctor, Eileen, and Wallis himself -- everyone who
was not either looking after the children or working the generator --
ran laughing and shouting along the tiny stretch of corridor and in and
out of the two cabins, stamping their feet like children in the poois of
sea water still covering the deck and bumping into each other and talking
hysterically about drying out the place and oiling the door hinges. But
gradually they grew quiet and gathered silently around the two portholes.
In the port looking forward they could see the outline of the navigation
deck and mainmast, dull shadows in a cool, green twilight, with the catwalk,
weather deck rail, and derricks in much greater detail. The view over the
side showed a sandy bottom with irregular outcroppings of reef. There were
very few fish about and very little undersea plant life. Wallis had been
surprised that the glass of the port had not been obscured by scum,
and guessed that a strong current or tidal effect kept the greenery from
taking hold. The view forward and upwards was cut off by the projecting
poop deck, but the second port was set in the side of the ship.
It showed the towering, black precipice of a reef which soared upwards
until it poked through the bright, dimpled mirror of the surface two
hundred feet above them.
"Now," said the doctor, laughing suddenly, "I can tell the days and not
just the months."
"Now," said Richard, in the most solemn voice that Wallis had ever heard
him use, "I know that there is something outside the ship
Shortly after that the joy and excitement of being able to see outside
was damped suddenly. Up until then nobody on Gulf Trader had died.
Jenny was the first one to go. Richard knew every bit as much as the
doctor did about the treatment and control of diabetes, but there was no
insulin on the ship and nothing that either of them could do. A little
later Richard's father tripped and hit his head against a hatch coaming
-- his mind had not been on what he was doing, only on his dead Jenny
-- and he did not regain consciousness. Then Margaret caught what both
the doctor and Richard agreed was pneumonia, and they broke the news
as gently as possible to Wallis that there was nothing they could do
for her, either, except to allow the lieutenant commander to stay in
the sick bay with her for as long as possible. Wallis began the watch,
which was both long and all too short, but he did not know exactly when
she died. He had been holding her in his arms, with one eye closed and
the other blinded with tears, for a long time, when Richard tapped him
gently on the shoulder and led him away.
After that the doctor and Wallis returned to sleeping together for warmth.
But it was a very cold winter and for many months their age had made it
impossible to exercise even briefly on the generator. More and more
frequently Wallis lay shivering and sleepless, just as he had done when
they were very recent survivors and worried about the possibility of
escape and very little else. Now he was not worried, but the death of
Margaret had left him with an aching sense of grief, which worsened with
every passing day. It was as if he had lost a limb and the shock was
beginning to wear off. But there were nights when he was able to sleep.
"What were you doing last night, sir?" the doctor said after one of them.
They were at breakfast and he was obviously trying to cheer Wallis up.
"When you grabbed me, for a minute I thought that you had designs on
my virtue!"
"I'll sleep somewhere else," said Wallis.
The doctor was silent for a moment, then he said awkwardly, "I know how
it was with you two. Putting your arm around me in your sleep doesn't
bother me. I like it. To tell the truth -- it doesn't make me feel so
cold. I'm always cold these days. . . ."
A few days later Surgeon Lieutenant Radford made a self-diagnosis of
pneumonia and Wallis began another long, heartbreaking watch. This time it
was shared by Richard, a young but strangely mature Richard who had grown
close to the doctor over the past few years, as close as he had ever been
to his parents. Richard watched dry-eyed and listened, in the doctor's
increasingly brief lucid spells, to his mentor laying down the law.
"I've packed your head full of symptoms and diseases and treatments which
you'll probably never get to use," Wallis heard him tell Richard on one
occasion, "and as a result you are pretty good on theory. Your practical
experience, on the other hand, is confined -- if you'll excuse the pun --
to maternity cases. You wouldn't know a liver or a transverse colon if
they were to stand up and slap your face. You can't help that, of course,
because we have no medical texts, or illustrations, or even the means
of making decent sketches. But in a day or two you will be in a position
to find out a few things and I urge you -- no dammit, I
order
you! --
to do so. You understand what I'm driving at? I do not want to go into
the bilge all in one piece!"
Richard understood what the doctor was driving at, and so did Wallis.
"Good!" said Radford weakly. "We'll make a doctor out of you yet. But
there's another thing -- a small point, really, but it sort of makes
your position official. I had to take it, and I'd the devil of a time
remembering all of it. You can repeat it after me.
"I swear by Apollo the Physician, by Aesculapius, Hygeia, and Panacea,
and I take to witness . . ."
Richard repeated the oath slowly and carefully, committing it to memory
against the time when he might have to administer it to someone else. He
was unlikely to forget it in any case, because people on the ship did
not forget things, the Game saw to that. But it was a long time before
Richard would answer to his title without looking uncomfortable or
objecting to its use.
And then the time came when Wallis himself began to display the old
familiar symptoms -- rendered unfamiliar only because he was viewing
them from the inside -- of shivering, of coughing fit to tear his chest
apart, and of increasing periods of delirium. He could not die well like
Doctor Radford; he was so afraid that he rarely spoke at all. In his
later lucid periods, though, he lay thinking about the sky and trees and
Margaret, and worrying about the hole they had all made in the ship's
food supply. There would be no actual shortage for a long, long time,
but David or Joseph should begin thinking seriously about growing food
to augment the canned supply. And he lay listening to his children and
the Dickson's and all their grandchildren playing the Game.
It was a story he had always liked, about a civilization that had grown
up in a giant interstellar ship lost forever among the stars, with
Joseph taking the part of Hugh Hoyland and his son that of the mutant
Joe-Jim. But they made it a short story. Wallis overheard Richard telling
everyone there would not be time enough to recite the dying Commander's
favorite novel. Considering the situation in Gulf Trader, Wallis thought,
it was a rather appropriate story.