The Chromosome Game Read online

  *

  Hawkridge staggered across to where Slazenger had slumped. ‘There’s no water.’

  Slazenger managed, ‘There must be places where no one looked for it.’

  ‘There are not.’ In fact, Tony Hawkridge was thorough by nature. Though he had known he was good as dead, he’d taken the elevator located at Centre Station and ridden to the deepest passenger deck. From there, he had used the engine-room companionway, each step negotiated in agony, and penetrated the lowest crew area. His sole thought was that one of the stricken might have concealed illicit supplies somewhere down there, only to forget about them in his dementia.

  The search revealed nothing except the peculiarly ordered state of the ship. It was as if the very lack of food and fluid served to heighten a collective obsession for hygiene. It had been preached from the beginning and would apply right to the end. The dead were ejected, by means of the vacuum device, the moment they became so much debris. Tony Hawkridge knew that he would commit himself to the departure chamber and leave a dying ship free from his own germs. It was senseless, but it had to be.

  The travelators that ran the entire length of the vessel were still in excellent order. Hawkridge stepped on J-Deck conveyor and the belt began to run for the last time. As it started, so the entire tunnel that housed it became lit end to end.

  You never got used to the immense proportions of this floating death-palace. You remembered, well enough, how it had been, not all that long ago, when it was teeming with men and women and their children … people who had never thought of volunteering for such a voyage, but who were selected by computer as being a cross-section of the culture from which they were to flee. Each of them had been virtually kidnapped without explanation, often without regard to their feelings for those they left behind. Next thing they knew they were incarcerated in a madman’s dream. From this dream there would be no awakening. It is positively against the rules of survival to surface a submarine and make your exit to the sickening tune of the Mega-Deathmarch … Strontium-90 emission at densities of the order of 200 Rems in the atmosphere kills more efficiently than any known virus. It achieves homicide as painfully as does an attack of rabies. While Caesium-137 is taking care of the tissue for keeps, Radio-Strontium is annihilating the bone marrow and transforming blood into something quite different. An ejection tube direct to the ocean is merciful enough compared with that.

  Hawkridge found himself at the far elevator. It was clean and spruce and good as new. It travelled smoothly and silently to the next deck up. Hawkridge thereafter zigzagged upward through the ship using travelators and alternate lifts in succession.

  There was no food and no water and no hope. And even though Slazenger knew this for certain already, Hawkridge had to repeat his grim epitaph several times before Slazenger, now so critically dehydrated that water could not have saved him in any case, conceded defeat.

  You would not have guessed that Slazenger was — had been — heavily built and enormously strong, both morally and physically. It had been Slazenger who had announced, over the ship’s loudspeaker system, that elementary calculations in simple arithmetic decreed that ‘This clinging to life is pointless. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever your faiths and your hopes, I beg you not to deceive yourselves. This vast ship cannot sustain life for more than a few weeks longer, and your suffering can only increase. I have asked the committee to issue a kind of ballot slip to each and every one of you. You will find no comfort in it, for you have only to mark that slip of paper with a cross, and you will have thereby voted for the scuttling of the vessel. If the motion is carried, the master valves will be opened and the ship flooded. If you feel you cannot face death by drowning and suffocation — it will happen very fast — then you may apply for cyanide ampules. Your pain and misery will be ended …’

  Incredibly, the voting was nine to one against. And with the unkind twist of logic that makes strong men weak in their convictions, Slazenger now found himself the partner to the only other passenger who had outlived the others — his own irrepressible instinct for survival proved stronger than his resolve …

  Now, Slazenger managed an abrasive smile. ‘I know of more intelligent breeds of rabbits than us. At least they know when to run.’

  Hawkridge said, ‘You knew. When you made the public announcement.’

  ‘Public! What an odd word. Yes, I knew.’ He screwed his eyes up toward Hawkridge. ‘We don’t do it, do we, Hawk?’

  ‘Not until we have to.’

  ‘Should we flood this thing? — Sink it?’

  ‘We could.’

  Slazenger tried to get some saliva to flow. It was nearly impossible to speak. ‘We could but you don’t want to. I wonder why.’

  ‘I don’t know why … A floating museum containing no one —’

  ‘— and no one to explore it.’ Slazenger looked down at the little heap of belongings and equipment that he’d collected for a particular purpose. ‘Tony, I know this sounds mad. I know we have every reason to believe there’s nobody out there.’ He thumbed toward the ejector tube. ‘Just dead bodies. But why make sense? No one else did. This enormous ship, must have cost a billion, who thought of it?’

  Hawkridge said, ‘Whoever thought of it didn’t think.’

  Slazenger said, ‘That’s what’s worrying me. Whoever thought of it was thinking of something we never guessed.’

  ‘Guessed?’

  ‘He had some other motive.’

  Hawkridge flipped through the pages of Webster’s dictionary. For some reason, Slazenger had chosen this to put among the other objects he’d accumulated. Hawkridge said, ‘Whoever it was, he didn’t leave evidence of any other motive aboard this ship.’

  ‘You mean we haven’t found it.’

  Hawkridge said, ‘What do you propose to do with all this gear?’

  ‘We leave it in the air-lock. Once we’ve been disposed of, the tube returns to its vacuum state. We can mummify a few things, in case …’ He broke off.

  ‘In case a UFO sort of drops in?’

  ‘I dunno. But the rest of the ship will gradually deteriorate — carbon monoxide leaking through, bacteria eating away at the upholstery … decomposition. You know.’

  ‘But this thing is totally sealed.’

  Slazenger began to raise his emaciated body … a thick-set skeleton in a thin sack of sagging flesh. ‘In time,’ he said, ‘even if Kasiga remains watertight, her internal organs will slowly disintegrate, as ours are doing now. Look at all this … posh decor. All so sleek and with-it. Think of it as it will become. Laminated plastic scrolling into powdery bundles and leaving the bulkheads to corrode. Furniture collapsing with woodworm … even two tiny grubs aboard the entire ship is enough, given time. Bolts and rivets snapping off as stresses and tensions change … as the hull ages, so it will get twisted … distorted, ever so slightly, but enough to tear the inside apart. Moisture, condensation will corrode it all; at first, almost imperceptibly. Later, in a rush, nearly every metal frame will pulp into its oxide state, leaving jagged bits of spare-rib, just like bits of our own ribs will eventually fossilize.’

  ‘Don’t go on.’

  ‘All right.’

  Hawkridge gazed across the Assembly Lounge. It was impeccable. There wasn’t even one faltering fluorescent tube in the lighting system. You could feel the swirl of air conditioning and faintly hear the fans. An almost undetectable rumble from deep beneath them testified to the smooth running of the master blowers. Even with the main engines dead — as they had been for weeks — Kasiga was a living ship, seemingly a marvel of futile technology, built to out-survive its passengers with sadistic indifference to the blank passenger-manifest.

  Hawkridge said, ‘Do we … Do we switch everything off?’

  ‘We don’t know how to. And I’m not in the mood to find out. Let her go on rolling —’

  ‘— with no film in the projector?’

  Slazenger said nothing to this. His eyes clouded slightly.

  Hawkridge s
aid, ‘There’s something at the back of your mind. You know about it, but you don’t know what it is or how it got there.’

  Slazenger said, ‘Let’s just leave everything running.’

  ‘Dammit, Slazenger! You must know why!’

  ‘All I know is, I’m dying. Let’s get in that chute. Get the stuff in the vacuum chamber. Mustn’t pollute the place with our own bodies. No future in that. Do you mind dying?’

  ‘Yes. I’m scared of it.’

  ‘Even now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So am I. Always was. Scared most of all when I got on the mike and told everyone to end it.’

  Hawkridge said, ‘I knew that, too.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘I expect so. That’s why they clung to life the way they did.’

  ‘We were a mad civilization, Hawk.’

  ‘And we’ve paid for it.’ Hawkridge opened the Ejector Chute doors by keying-in the command.

  As the bulkhead gaped open with a faint electrical whine, something of the former robustness entered Slazenger’s voice. ‘Don’t dawdle, man! Who knows? — we might meet in heaven.’

  ‘What do you expect to find there?’

  A decent set of golf clubs …’

  Minus Thirteen

  But to what community did Hawkridge and Slazenger think they were referring when they commented on their impending arrival in Heaven? No one had ever been there and returned to tell the tale. Preachers had preached; but there was one thing they always seemed to forget: Mankind was wrought in the image of God. Why should it ever have been supposed that ‘God’ — and for that matter his executive staff — could have lagged Mankind in technology? On the contrary, it was due to celestial inspiration that Homo Sapiens conceived all things from the airplane to the computer … just as Michelangelo derived his works from the same source. The ideal of ‘Heaven’ was contrived for comparatively primitive Peoples who thought that planet Earth was the centre of the Universe.

  In fact, when Slazenger and Hawkridge fell through that cavity that divides material existence from a spiritual one, the first phenomenon of which they became conscious was the miracle of Quantum Radio — a means of communication available to the gods of the universe for the coordination of their work throughout the lattice of the stars. Conventional radio as Man knew it could only link station to station at the speed of light. Light travels at a mere 186,000 miles per second. For the gods to attempt communication at such a snail’s pace would be like listening to the striking of Big Ben from a space module: the position of the hands on the face of the clock would be ludicrously ahead of the bells. The velocity of Quantum Radio is instantaneous; and indeed, when you are running an entire universe of infinite proportions you must constantly deal in miracles, if only because the magnitude of the Cosmos is a miracle in itself … as every earthly astronomer always knew.

  If the ancient concept of Heaven is glossily wide of the mark, the idea of Purgatory comes a good deal closer — though according to what Slazenger and Hawkridge were finding out, immediately upon their ejection from Submarine Kasiga — it was and is an efficient and reasonably comfortable place of duty. For instance, when Conrad Hilton finally ceased his life on Earth, he found himself commissioned, by the senior god, to erect a massive hotel on Star 47 — Headquarters of Universe Control. And it was in this environment that people like Hawkridge, now spiritually transmuted, learned rapidly about the scale of Universal Operations.

  Much was explained to him during an interview with the Senior Interrogod — the direct Overlord to the Attorney-General for the Milky Way Sector.

  ‘Your duties here,’ said the Interrogod, ‘will initially involve writing a full report on the reasons why you think Kasiga was disguised as an escape ship. Apart from the passengers — all of whom were unscrupulously deprived of mortal life including you and Slazenger — do you know who else or what else was aboard that ship?’

  ‘We had a kind of a hunch, Interrogod, that there was something. We had no idea what.’

  ‘Such hunches may be valuable to the Court of Enquiry, which of course you will be attending. I trust you will make yourself available during the Hearing?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you know what takes place here? — on Star 47?’

  ‘I understood it was classified information.’

  ‘Only to people during their mortal life. You’ll be taken round the Headquarters but there’s one essential I must explain to you first. Do you understand the meaning of the word “Re-perception”?’

  ‘No, sir. I do not.’

  ‘Briefly it is this: I — together with my colleagues and these surroundings — appear to you in the form you can most easily accept. You know a hotel when you see one; you know the English language when you hear it; you know — because Man was made in God’s image — what I seem to look like. But throughout the Cosmos there are many millions of intelligent species, not all of them based on carbon-life, to whom everything and everybody on Star 47 must appear equally acceptable. For instance, a fungoid life-form as is found on a star-cluster beyond the Crab Nebula would have to perceive a different view of me altogether. I don’t have to go into details regarding how this is done; but so far as planet Earth and its inhabitants are concerned we had been prepared to go the limit in trying to prevent the nuclear holocaust that finally took place. You Earth-people were prone to believing in spacial hardware such as flying saucers — sometimes called UFOs — and so my Commander-in-Chief re-perceived his space vehicles so as to maintain a watching-brief on the hideous work being done there by the Anti-gods —’

  ‘— Emissaries of the Devil?’

  ‘Precisely. That is your name for the Essence of Evil. But this is the point: during these reconnoitering activities he discovered for certain that there was not one single survivor from the holocaust. Do you follow what I’m getting at in terms of your own role? — with particular reference to the Court of Enquiry?’

  ‘I think so, Interrogod. You’re asking me if either Slazenger or myself had any real inkling of the true reason why Kasiga was launched.’

  Well?’

  ‘The answer is that if she’s still at sea, and if at least part of her is intact, Kasiga hasn’t yet even begun to reveal her true purpose.’

  ‘And what do you think that purpose really is?’

  ‘My answer will not sound very convincing. After all, sire was put to sea — as far as Earth-time is concerned — over three hundred years ago.’

  ‘You can dismiss reservations like that. It would have taken at least that time for it to be safe for any plan to be implemented … radiation damage to the environment would have been taken into account by those who laid the foundations of this project.’

  ‘Then you must have a shrewd idea about the nature of this plan.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘From what you’ve been saying, yes. I can’t see how: but what you’re talking about is no less than the survival of the species.’

  ‘And wasn’t it just such a hunch on the part of you and Slazenger that so puzzled you both prior to being jettisoned from the ship? … We do have the tapes.’

  ‘Then you will know, sir, that we never got as far as any definite conclusion like that.’

  ‘One more question. Does the expression ‘ZD-One’ mean anything to you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Thank you. You may leave.’

  *

  The night skies part and the gods look down.

  A hot wind seethes across the desert plains and eddies thousands of feet into the sky, percolating red dust into the ultra-violet belt. Vortices like rotating coil-springs obliterate the scarlet sun with gritty spiral highways of radioactive silt.

  These particles begin to whirl around the Earth, transforming the weather patterns as if it were Mars. For as long as it takes to wipe-out species after species, an unhealthy shroud locks-in the stale air whilst at the same time masking the healing rays of the sun. Plant Chlorophyll de
composes, leaving what vegetation there is so anaemic that much of it becomes extinct, sparing only the mightier strains — mighty in their unconquerable will to survive.

  Gradually the deadly fall-out is sieved and thinned out, cleansed and diluted by orange-coloured rams. Throughout the globe life begins to take a breather, only to grimly survey the desolation to which it must adapt.

  While Kasiga slides silently below the surface of the Atlantic, rid long since of her human relics, there is frenetic activity beneath the Pacific. Coral reef is being eaten away at an accelerating rate because the organism that feeds on it has multiplied unimpeded.

  Twentieth Century Man set this off. Blind to the consequences, military men pulverized the rockbed around Bikini Atol with experimental nuclear bombs. Radiation thus unleashed wiped out a tiny species which, in turn, had preyed upon those with such an avid appetite for the reefs whose very existence depended on the balanced aquarium of nature. In its turn, the Gulf Stream, having relied for its course on the coral, chose a new oceanic path as the reefs became eroded. The warm waters were carried elsewhere, leaving icebergs to entomb sea life, only to flow onward around the globe and further enhance the greed of the bloated survivors. The accelerating catastrophe ran full-cycle, each deformity compounding the next.

  Thereafter, the desert cyclones spread offshore and, through convection, thieved the vapour off the seas and put it down on territory where soiled rain merely sprinkled the dust and damped unfertilized soil without issue. It took over a hundred years for nature to bring into play its bigger guns. Using residual radiation it devised new, mutated organisms which learned, through natural selection, to tip the scales toward stability.

  But nature — by definition an experimental laboratory — did not, in every case, restore balance unerringly. Lumbered with the ecological applecart defacing so abused a planet, it found itself in possession of unlabelled test-tubes the contents of which proved disastrous once they got out. These were bio-chemical rollercoasters, gathering momentum uncontrollably and hurtling into troughs of oblivion. Nature, in stopping one hole in the leaking aquarium, merely forced further cracks. Repairing these led to weaknesses elsewhere; and hasty bodging leads to panic in the mind of the best of engineers.