“Most of their doors are permanently shut since the pirate attack,” the Colonel said. “We need to know which doors are in use, and how they’re guarded. If we could shut them in-“

“Then what?” Hesse said. “We starve them? Sooner or later they’ll make a way out.”

“Let me talk to them first,” Travis said. “Let’s give them a day to cool off. I’ll go up in the morning and find out what I can find out and we’ll see where we are.”

Brenda went on about the water.

“For now, we still have water pressure from the tank, but we’ll have to cut rations again.”

“What about the catch basins?” Hesse said.

“We just can’t rely on the catch basins,” Brenda said. “If we go without rain for a couple days, we’ll be real thirsty. However! There is another possibility. They all told me we couldn’t run the desalination plant to make fresh water from sea water without the engines running, but I’ve figured a way. It’ll take a lot of fuel. Which means we’d run out of power, sooner. It’ll also take a lot of time, and frankly, I need to be working on the satellite link. But look, if it gets bad and we need to make fresh water, I think we could do it.”

She looked from face to face trying to read their confidence or fear.

After the meeting, Travis wondered why he held back about the gun as he walked away.

He was uncomfortable and not ready to return to the Piano Lounge. He visited the Champagne Bar to see if the baby had recovered. He was disturbed by the news. The baby had responded to the antibiotics at first but then had gotten worse, not just the coughing but diarrhea, and vomiting any food she managed to take in. The mother looked half dead with exhaustion and fear.

Travis hurried to find Joel Conrad.

The Vikings Sports Hall had changed. Instead of music and laughter hitting him first, there was a cloud of marijuana smoke in the still air of the hall. The mood inside had changed. It was a zombie version of his first visit. As many were there as before, but the air was filled with smoke. The men and women looked wild, their faces and eyes intense and sickly. It was quieter. Some leaned back smoking. Others just leaned back, while a few lay motionless on the table or in their booths. The ship-wide epidemic of wet coughing was terrible in here, and a dozen or more chests rattled with their breath.

There was still rock-and-roll music playing, but there was no one behind the bar. There was a brick of hash, a plastic bag overflowing with marijuana. Scattered on the bar were assorted drugs and paraphernalia.

He found Dr. Joel Conrad sleeping in a booth, by a statue of Jimmy Connors. Travis shook him awake.

“Travis!” he said at last. “Oh, Travis. I’m happy to see you.”

He stank.

“Joel, the baby is dying.”

“I know,” Joel Conrad said sadly. “It’s the flu. Norovirus. The pneumonia came from the flu. We fought the pneumonia, but the flu never went away.”

Travis protested with stammers and stutters, trying to force the doctor to see a solution, something they could try.

“It’s this ship!” Conrad exclaimed. “The ship poisoned her, it’s poisoning all of us. The air is making the whole damn ship sick with fecal bacteria. In natural earth, our waste feeds life. Here, in this construct, our waste is destroying us. We make ourselves sick here.”

“You can’t quit on us,” Travis said. “That baby will die.”

“YES!” Joel Conrad stood. “Now you see! That baby will die, and soon! And then we all will die. Let me die in comfort and with some fun, is that so wrong? You all are going to get worse up there, and you’ll tear each other apart. I don’t need to watch that. I’ve done what I could, but there’s no more to be done. We’ve got an abundance of fun here, hash and coke from the staff, weed from the refugees, and of course, there’s the clinic. Leave me go out with a smile.”

“Yeah,” Travis looked around the zombie bar. “Have a blast.”

He felt dizzy going back upstairs. He passed through the Atrium and tried to regain his focus on his mission for tomorrow. The faces in the crowd struck him: so lost, hopeless and stupid. Travis was no hero, but he wasn’t weak, and he felt sorry for those who were – not weak necessarily, but weak compared to their circumstances. Looking at the faces in the Atrium, he felt sad for them. You could see it on their faces: there was nothing they could do for themselves. He wanted to do something for them.

He went out on the walking deck to escape the wretched air. The cool wind refreshed him, but the low, heavy clouds seemed to be weighing right down on them, as if the pressure of the clouds themselves were raising the tensions on the ship. On this side of the ship, all the lifeboats were gone and there were a score of empty davits hanging over the side.

39

 

They believed in Adam Melville because he had the strength to do what they needed to do, but could not. He had been on this runaway train into violence and conflict and he had jumped from the door, and shown them there was a place to land. He had gone against Lee Golding. They’d been intimidated by the giant that was the Mighty Lee Golding, but Adam wouldn’t be. He had a big back they could all shelter behind.

The rain was back. It was loud on the glass roof of the solarium and it was dark inside. Adam was lying on his back, looking up. It was still early and others milled about or sat or stood in their small groups. They kept a distance from him, most of them. He could block them out as he looked up. In the darkness of the sky, an underside of a cloud was illuminated by the ship’s spotlight. The heavens themselves were made seen by that light from the ship below, a cylinder connecting two spots in an endless darkness. That’s what Adam saw.

He was becoming more comfortable with what had happened.

He’d always believed in God, sometimes perhaps with more definitive ideas of what that meant. But he always knew there was something, and if there were something, it would be participating in this. If there was one thing he understood that others didn’t, it was that this was an Earth shattering event. Biblical. God would be involved.

Adam had always known he was special. He’d always been where he was supposed to be. Here was a flood, and he was on a boat, and the very fact of their lack of rescue after all this time testified that the world was gone, or crippled at the least. So God was showing himself through Biblical methods- whether this was self-referential of God, or merely a manner of showing Himself in a way he and others would get, Adam didn’t know. Either way, God was communicating through that Bible, re-inventing the story of Noah and the flood, when the animals and people were kept safe on the ark as the corrupt Earth was cleansed.

And here he was, a giant of a man, with flowing hair and beard, and a loud, deep, clear voice. All he needed to complete the part of prophet was a robe, and he could get one in any stateroom. He chuckled. He was giddy, and embarrassed at himself for it. It was exciting, though. Adam forced the lightness from his mind and refocused on the seriousness of his position. There were many people to save.

In the night, he walked the ship. He liked the darkness.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death. He entered an abandoned stateroom he knew of – between those like him who had lost their rooms in the attack, and the refugees, many of the abandoned rooms had found sub-letters. There were many fewer on board than there had been, but Adam knew of a few that were still empty. He also knew that there were floaters around, those that stayed in different rooms each night. In this particular room, he went to the bedside nightstand and found a Gideon’s Bible.

He took it to the spa, part of which lay directly under the solarium. He had found cupboards full of electric candles, and he lit them, creating a pagan atmosphere by the pool. Soft light danced on the water. He stripped and dove in.