Godspeed (14 page)

On our way to Upside we had one more new experience, something that none of us Downsiders liked at all. The ferry ship moved along faster and faster, boosted by a series of launch grids spaced around Erin's equator. But in spite of that increasing speed, the forces on us became less and less. I felt myself easing away from my seat, and I stayed where I was only because we had been strapped down at liftoff.

My stomach wasn't strapped down, though. It was floating free, and ready to do terrible things.

It didn't, because with Doctor Eileen's approval Danny Shaker had given us a drug to quiet our nausea. But it was a close thing, at least for me. I was a full week in space before I got my "space stomach" completely and the occasional fits of dizziness and discomfort of free-fall sickness went away.

But that was a long way in the future. Still, I was better off than some of the others. I heard awful noises coming from Uncle Duncan and Walter Hamilton and Danny Shaker saying cheerfully, "Into the container. Right in front of you!" Apparently the drug was not working for them. I folded my arms across my middle, gripped the restraining straps, and told myself not to look at the others. Instead I stared at a screen showing the field of view ahead of the ferry ship, and resolved not to disgrace myself.

It seemed days before the bulk of Upside was visible ahead and we were closing in for rendezvous. But by that time the worst was over. When we floated into the big entry dock and the doors closed behind us, even Walter Hamilton and Uncle Duncan, as pale and empty-looking as two crumpled paper bags, were able to stagger and float off the ferry ship and through to the interior of Upside. Two station staff members took them at once to a section where gravity was maintained, less than that of Erin's surface but enough to dispel the feeling of free fall.

Doctor Eileen and Danny Shaker went with them, leaving me alone with James Swift. We sat holding our stomachs and staring at each other warily.

"Well?" he said at last. His face was pale beneath the freckles, an odd contrast to his flaming-red hair. For once he didn't look angry at everyone in the world.

"I wouldn't say
well,
" I said. "But I'm not as bad as I was a few minutes ago."

"Me too. Poor old Walter. He really didn't want to come, you know, he's happiest in a library. But Doctor Xavier talked him into it."

"I don't see why either of you came." That had been on my mind since I met the two of them. "You don't seem anything like spacers."

"
We
don't!" He glared at me, and his face took on a pinker tone. I realized that other things came along with that flaming mop. "What about you. How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"That's what I thought. You're just a kid. What are you doing on this trip?"

That gave me a problem. I couldn't tell him, but also I couldn't tell him why I couldn't tell him.

"I'm a sort of trainee. I want to be a spacer when I'm old enough."

That last part was true enough, and James Swift nodded. He calmed down a little. "I used to think that way myself when I was your age. You'll change your mind, though, when you've met a few spacers."

I had met more than he suspected, but I didn't want to disagree with him or let the conversation go anywhere near Paddy Enderton. I switched subjects. "Dr. Swift, I still don't understand what you do."

"Call me Jim. We're not at the university now, and we're going to be spending a lot of time together." He held out his hand, something he hadn't done when we were first introduced, and I felt stable enough to be able to reach out and shake it.

"Be careful how you handle Walter, though," he went on. "Always call him Doctor Hamilton. He likes to sit on his title, though he's nowhere near as smart as I am. But why do you say you don't understand what I do? Weren't you listening this afternoon?"

And I'll be careful with you, too,
I thought. But all I said was, "I listened. But I couldn't make sense of any of it. Nor could Captain Shaker."

We both looked to the door, wondering when Danny Shaker and the others were likely to be back. Until they returned we had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

"You said you don't teach," I added. "I never heard of a professor before who isn't a teacher."

"I had a few . . . disagreements. About the right way to deal with students who were idiots." He glanced away from me. "I think I may be too used to working with specialists. Let me try again on the explanations. You tell me the minute I don't seem to make sense. Do you know what atoms and electrons are?"

"Of course I do! I may be only sixteen, but I'm not a halfwit."

"Sorry. Well, the rules that tell how atoms and the things they're made of behave are quite different from the rules that apply for big objects. Movement from one condition to another, or the transfer of energy, takes place in individual steps."

"I know that, too. They're called quanta."

"Right. You're ahead of a lot of the people who come to study at the university. Some of them are allowed in when they don't know
anything.
" An irritated look, and the face reddening again. "Anyway, quanta just means
pieces,
and we say that energy and atomic states are
quantized.
But other things can be quantized. Energy is carried from place to place by things called
fields,
and those fields are quantized, too. That's usually called
second quantization.
And last of all, space itself is quantized. That's called
third quantization.
"

"You've lost me. You mean space, like
space.
Like there is out here?" I looked around me, but we were in an interior chamber of Upside and all I could see were walls.

"Yes. Space is quantized."

"But empty space is just—well,
empty.
It's nothing. That's what the word means."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Jim Swift wrinkled up his forehead. "When I sit back and listen to myself, I have to agree with you. Empty space ought to be empty, by definition. We need a different word. Let's talk about
vacuum
instead. When you set up the theory correctly, you find that even when a vacuum has no matter in it, it's not really empty. It has
energy,
a thing called the vacuum energy. If you could get at the vacuum energy, and use it in the right way, then you might be able to do something else. You might be able to trade energy for movement. You could have very rapid movement, through point to point in quantized space."

"Can you really do that?"

"Well . . . no. But that's what I study, at the university. It's my specialty. And don't laugh, but I'll tell you what I think. And I believe that what I think on this subject is better than anyone ever thought before." When he was talking about anything but work—and wasn't busy losing his temper—his voice was easygoing and diffident. But when he was lecturing me, he took on the strangest mixture of arrogance and distant calm.

"I believe," he went on, "that there was a time, before the Isolation, when people knew how to tap the vacuum energy. And they could use that and third quantization to travel in space. Travel
fast,
much faster than light. Quantum transitions take no time at all."

"The Godspeed Drive!" I wondered how much Doctor Eileen had talked, after swearing the rest of us to strict secrecy.

"Exactly. And if that's true, the big mystery is this: What went wrong? Why did the ships stop coming? Walter tends to be a bit stuffy and arrogant, but he actually knows his subject very well. And he insists that the old records—such as they are—show that everything went wrong
instantly.
One minute, ships and supplies arriving; the next, nothing. Erin was on its own, struggling to survive and only just making it. No messages, no warnings, no explanations. The spacers sometimes come back and tell us there are strange objects out in the Forty Worlds, things like the Luimneach Anomaly. But their information raises more questions than it answers. Maybe this trip will be different."

I could see why Eileen Xavier wanted Jim Swift and Walter Hamilton along on the journey. But what had she
said
to them?

An answer to that question had to wait, though, because Danny Shaker was floating back into the room. "Your colleague is feeling much better," he said to Jim Swift. "How about you?"

"I'm fine. Where is Walter? I'd like to see him."

"Come with me." Danny Shaker turned and floated out again.

Jim Swift followed, much more clumsily. Movement in little or no gravity was obviously going to take some getting used to. For lack of anything better to do I tagged along behind, bouncing now and again off walls, floor and ceiling and struggling to learn the right combination of muscles.

The corridor that we were moving in was long, straight, and featureless, but after thirty or forty meters I began to feel a definite sense of
down.
My feet didn't just touch the floor, they pressed on it a little bit.

The sensation of weight steadily increased, until at the end of the corridor we came to a big circular room. It reminded me of a ward in the Toltoona hospital, bare, overheated, and filled with uncomfortable-looking beds.

Walter Hamilton was sitting on one of them, his color much improved from the last time I had seen him. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen or Uncle Duncan.

"Food machines through there," Shaker said, nodding to a big sliding door. "Are you hungry?"

Walter Hamilton put his hands to his stomach and seemed appalled at the idea, and Jim Swift shook his head and sank onto a bed next to his colleague.

Danny Shaker turned to me. "Jay?"

It was hard to believe, but although my stomach still wanted to float up into my throat, I was suddenly starving. I nodded.

"I thought so. Come on." And then, as he led the way through the doors, which opened automatically at our approach, "You're a natural, Jay. You're going to make a fine spacer."

When he said that I couldn't help thinking of Paddy Enderton, with liquor on his breath and his big, sweaty, insincere face pushed close to mine, saying, "You'll be the finest spacer that ever lifted off Erin." But there was a world of difference between the two men: Enderton gruff and slovenly, Danny Shaker soft-spoken and precise in speech and movement. I resolved to study the easy, economical way he moved in low gravity, and learn to imitate it.

We reached the machines, and Danny Shaker showed me how to operate them, how to make the food selection and key in the way that I wanted it cooked and prepared.

The food itself was a curious disappointment. It was edible enough, but somehow I had expected that space food ought to be
different
from the food down on Erin. Of course, it was exactly the same. As Shaker pointed out to me, every morsel of food that I—or anyone else—consumed in space was grown down on the surface of Erin, and shipped up. The only exception was salt. There were huge deposits of that on Sligo, the fourth moon of Antrim, and ton after ton was shipped down to Erin before Winterfall.

"And lucky for us that we can go to Sligo and mine it," said Shaker. "Because there's precious little to be found on Erin. Salt is sodium chloride, and sodium's a rarity back down there."

"I don't like salt."

"Maybe not. But you need it. A human can't live without it. If we couldn't get into space from Erin, I doubt there'd be a person alive there now."

It was something else to ponder. Back home people gave the impression that the things coming to Erin from the Forty Worlds were nice to have, but not really essential. Now I was hearing that Erin couldn't exist without the spacers.

"Come on." Danny Shaker had watched me eat, without showing any interest in food himself. "We've got work to do."

"I thought we were ready to leave."

"We are. Tom Toole and the rest of the crew ought to be up from Erin by now. They'll be on board the
Cuchulain,
along with Doctor Xavier. But we are going to be away for a long time, and I always do the final check of supplies and ship condition. That way I can't blame anybody but myself, if we get into deep space and things aren't right."

I had been longing to see the
Cuchulain
since I first heard the ship's name, but there was one more scary experience to go through before I could do that. Only a small part of Upside held an atmosphere. The rest of it, including the access paths to all the deep-space ships, sat in vacuum.

With Shaker's help I eased my way into a suit, making the thirty-six point checks that in a few weeks would become automatic: air, filters (dual), heat, insulation, temperature, communication, nutrition, elimination (dual), medication, attitude control (triple), position jets (dual), joints (thirteen), seals (four), and suit condition displays (three).

Then came the two minutes while the pumps returned the air of the chamber we were in to the pressurized part of Upside, and I watched my suit's external pressure gauge drop steadily to zero. Soon there was nothing between me and hard vacuum but the thin shell of my suit.

Danny Shaker saved me again, acting as though what we were doing was the most natural thing in the world. "If you're ever not quite happy with anything while the pressure's going down," he said casually, "all you have to do is press the
Restore
panel on the wall there. The chamber will repressurize within five seconds. Hold tight, now. We're off."

He was actually the one doing the holding. Almost before I knew what was happening he had taken the arm of my suit in his gauntleted hand, and was steering us out of the lock. I had assumed that we would emerge into open space. Wrong again. We were in a corridor no different from the one that had led us to the chamber—except that the external pressure showed as negligible, and the external temperature was a hundred degrees below zero.

The final surprise was the
Cuchulain
itself. It floated in a gigantic open hangar, controlled in its position by gentle electromagnetic fields. Its shape was neither the bowl of the ferry ships, nor the slim needle of an atmospheric flier. Instead I found myself staring at a long warty stick, with a flared cone at one end and a small sphere attached to the other.