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.
Closing the cover, then, in total blackness, he began to lower himself down the tube. Hands, shoulders, feet; hands, shoulders, feet. Over and over again, as mountain climbers work their way up and down crevasses.
After several minutes, he was startled by a sudden glow of light from above. He glanced up. The opening of the tube was nearly a hundred feet overhead now. He wondered if they would be able to pick him out in the darkness, this far down the shaft.
"Can you see him?" called a voice that echoed through the steel tube. Conroy could see a head silhouetted against the light.