Adventure stories; Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Mutiny -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction
Peter Conroy had been born in deep space and
the starship was the only home he knew. It
was a good reason why he must fight for this--
Voyage To Procyon
By Robert Silverberg
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
June 1958
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
In the deepest level of the mighty _Starship I_, Peter Conroy lay
hidden in a cornfield. Around him waved the tall stalks of ripening
corn; high overhead, near the distant ceiling of the level, blazed the
actinic lights that irradiated the broad field.
And nearby, Conroy could hear the stealthy footsteps of Bayliss Kent
and his men, searching desperately for him. They _had_ to find him--and
Peter Conroy had to keep from being found.
Crouching low, he edged forward between the bending stalks. Kent
thought he had Conroy hemmed in, that he had the entrance to the
cornfield guarded. Conroy grinned. He had been brought up in the
Agronomy section; Kent and his men hadn't. It made a difference.
He looked around carefully, then began moving slowly away from them
on his hands and knees. _If I can only reach the irrigation tube in
time_, he thought. _If_--
It had been over fifty years since the _Starship I_ had left Earth. For
more than half a century, the great ship had been headed toward the
star Procyon and the planets around it--habitable planets, detected by
the Lunar telescope. Fifty years, and there was still a hundred years
of flight yet to come before the huge ship reached her destination.
Conroy and all the others of his generation had been born on the ship,
as had most of their parents before them. The ship, with its vast
farms, its great factories, and its clusters of living centers, was all
the world they knew.
But Bayliss Kent and his little party of malcontents wanted to change
all that. They wanted to go back to Earth.
Suddenly, something crackled under Conroy's knee, and he froze. A dry
leaf--nothing more. But had the others heard it?
He couldn't be sure. The searchers were making quite a bit of noise
themselves, and perhaps they might have thought it was one of their own
group who had made the sound. He decided to risk it, and moved on.
Just ahead of him was the irrigation tube. Again Conroy called on his
special knowledge of the Agronomy section. This particular acreage of
corn was in the harvest season--almost ready to cut. There wouldn't be
any water in the irrigation tubes now.
The tube was a little over three feet across and dropped down into the
sub-levels of the ship, where the water-purifiers were. Conroy peered
into the tube's depths for a moment, then lifted up the hinged cover,
lowered himself into the tube, and braced his feet against one side and
his shoulders against the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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