Godspeed (18 page)

"And animals?" I asked.

Now it was Tom Toole who guffawed and turned to Danny Shaker. "He's got you, Chief."

"Indeed he does." Shaker turned off the display. "There could be animals, Jay, and there probably are, even if they're only single-celled ones. But we've seen nothing that's a unique signature for them, the way that chlorophyll is for growing plant life. We'll know in a few hours, though. Because Doctor Xavier promised to send us a message back. She knows we're as curious about it as she is."

It was all right for him to say that, and act as calm as could be. But I don't think any of them was as keen to know what was down there as I was.

It wasn't fair. I felt that it was
my
world. I was the one on the expedition who had found out that
Paddy's Fortune
even existed. Yet now I was the one sitting up here, left behind while the doctor went to look at it.

I told myself, for about the hundredth time, that Doctor Eileen was carrying her feelings of duty toward my mother to ridiculous lengths.

It was going to be another few hours before I learned that the idea of leaving me behind on the
Cuchulain
had been strongly supported by Danny Shaker.

CHAPTER 15

One of Mother's favorite sayings, used whenever she was making me do something that she wanted me to do as opposed to something that I wanted to do myself, was, "The devil finds work for children's idle hands."

From what I had been told of history, the devil had even better success with adults; however, it was never any good arguing that point with Mother. And if she had known about what happened next on the
Cuchulain,
she would have said that it proved she was right.

With Doctor Eileen off to visit
Paddy's Fortune,
and the ship's crew busy at their own work, I was left with nothing to do. For the first few hours I didn't mind that at all. I took out the little calculator/display unit that had belonged to Paddy Enderton, and I tried to find out more about how it worked. It was something I had been wanting to do for weeks, but I hadn't dared, because Doctor Eileen believed that the unit was back home at our house by Lake Sheelin.

I hadn't exactly lied to anyone. When we left, Mother had packed my bag for me. She didn't include the calculator, though I knew that she and Doctor Eileen had talked about it. I didn't believe that she had left it out by accident, but at the last moment, when everyone was ready to leave, I nipped upstairs and slipped the little plastic wafer into my pocket.

I told myself that no one had actually told me
not
to take it with me; on the other hand, I felt uneasy enough about what I had done that I left the unit hidden away, all through our trip out to the Maze.

Now that Doctor Eileen and the others from Erin were finally out of the way, I sat down at the table in our living quarters and started work. What I was after was more information about
Paddy's Fortune.
When I had asked for information at the Second Data Level before, nothing had appeared on the display. The assumption we had made then was that it was blank because nothing more was stored about
Paddy's Fortune,
and the data bank contained only its coordinate set. But suppose that was wrong. Suppose Paddy Enderton had deliberately
hidden
additional information about the mysterious worldlet that was supposed to make his fortune? What a coup it would be if I, sitting back aboard the
Cuchulain,
could come up with more information about
Paddy's Fortune
than Doctor Eileen, Jim Swift, and the others, over exploring the planetoid itself.

Pure wishful thinking, I guess, because if Paddy Enderton had stored other data about his worldlet in the little unit he had done it too cleverly for me. After three or four hours that got me nowhere, I was frustrated and irritated. I turned the unit off, hid it away in my pocket, and left our living quarters. I went wandering away along the length of the
Cuchulain,
heading toward the cargo hold but with my mind still on the little calculator unit. Where had it come from?

Paddy Enderton, according to Doctor Eileen, had never visited
Paddy's Fortune.
Also, according to the doctor, the calculator could not have been made anywhere in the Forty Worlds. That left a real mystery: How had the gadget come into Paddy Enderton's hands?

It was while I was chewing on that problem, and getting nowhere, that I noticed one of the bulkhead doors, halfway along the cargo column, standing a few inches ajar.

According to everything that I had been told about shipboard procedures, it was an unforgivable sin for anyone to leave those doors open. They divided the ship into a number of airtight compartments. This limited the damage that could be done by a seal failure, anywhere in the whole structure, to a loss of air in a single part.

I closed the bulkhead door, carefully dogged it to, and hurried along to check the rest of the cargo column. Everything was in order, all the way to the drive unit. The drive was switched off, because the
Cuchulain
had been placed in a free-fall orbit that matched the orbit of
Paddy's Fortune.
I took a few minutes for another inspection of the drive. In spite of all the maintenance work that had been done on it there was a used, battered look to the equipment. How long did Danny Shaker say it had been in continuous use?

A couple of centuries, at least. So how much longer would it last? Long enough, I hoped, for us to complete our journey.

And with that thought I became aware of a violent knocking, back along the cargo column. I hurried that way. Before I was halfway there I knew that the sound was coming from the bulkhead door that I had closed.

I slipped the latch and waited, afraid of what would happen next. Sure enough, the door banged wide and Patrick O'Rourke popped out. He was wearing a suit with its helmet open, and his face was an angry red.

He glared at me. "Did
you
do that?"

It was tempting to play innocent, but I knew it wouldn't work—there was no one else around.

"The bulkhead was open—I was told it always had to be kept closed. . . ."

"It never occurred to you that at the end of every long trip, a systematic check is made on
all
seals? To do that, you have to leave them open, one after another. It's a long job. We were halfway through, and now the whole thing has to be started over. Hours of work. You stupid—stupid—" He stared at me pop-eyed, searching for the worst insult he could think of. "You stupid
child.
Well, you'll not cause us any more trouble today."

He grabbed me by one arm and the back of my neck, hard enough to hurt, and pushed me along in front of him.

"Stop it," I complained. "You don't have to do that, I can walk for myself. Let go of me!"

But he didn't, not until we were at the living quarters that Doctor Eileen and I and the rest of us from Erin had been assigned. Then O'Rourke opened the door and threw me inside. "Get in and stay in," he shouted after me. "For your own sake. I'm going to have to explain to the chief why my whole maintenance crew is three hours behind in their work. And let me tell you, he's not going to like that one bit."

The door slammed shut, and was locked from the outside. I rubbed at my neck—O'Rourke had left bruises there. For maybe two minutes I worried about what I had done, and what would be said to Danny Shaker.

Then I started to feel angry. I couldn't be expected to know about ship's maintenance, or what was done at the end of each trip. So far as I could see, I had behaved perfectly responsibly. The bulkhead had been open, when it wasn't supposed to be. I had closed it, like a safety-conscious passenger—and been
blamed,
instead of praised.

I went to the door and hammered at it. A couple of minutes of that was enough to convince me that it was pointless. O'Rourke and his crew were far away along the cargo column, and no one else had any reason to come to our quarters, not when Doctor Eileen and the others were away on
Paddy's Fortune.

I was stuck, until Patrick O'Rourke took it into his head to come along and let me out. From the look of him when he left, that could be many hours.

I went back to the table and took Paddy Enderton's calculator out of my pocket. But in my irritated and impatient mood working on it appealed even less to me now than when I had left. I put it away again and went wandering around the living quarters. After a few minutes I crouched down next to one of the air duct panels.

No one on board the
Cuchulain
could really be locked up. There had to be emergency routes, ready in case the usual ways were blocked. To escape from our living quarters, all I had to do was remove the grille, crawl along an air duct until I reached a point outside the locked region, and push my way out past another air grille.

Which was, I decided, exactly what I was going to do. I would find Danny Shaker and give him
my
version of events, to balance out whatever it might be that Patrick O'Rourke was going to tell him.

I pulled the air grille away from the wall, lay flat, and peered inside. The passageway was about two feet across: big enough for any but the fattest crew member, and high enough for me to crawl along comfortably on my hands and knees. I started out. The duct was cool and pleasant, with fresh air sighing past me as I crawled.

In less than a minute I had gone far enough to put our living quarters well behind me. Grilles, placed along the wall of the duct every ten yards or so, made sure that I could get out any time I chose. I peered through one. I saw a groundhog's view of a deserted companionway.

This is where there may be some truth to Mother's saying about the devil and idle hands. I still had nothing to do. It occurred to me that hidden away in the air duct system as I was I could see and not be seen, and hear but not be heard. If I wriggled my way along to Danny Shaker's cabin I might be able to hear whatever Patrick O'Rourke was going to accuse me of doing. When the time came for me to refute what he said I would be ready, point by point.

It was not easy to judge distances, crawling along as I was in a darkness relieved only by light scattering in through the air grilles. On the other hand, I could hardly go in the wrong direction. All the crew quarters lay in the same part of the ship, aft of ours. I went that way, taking my time, and pausing every now and then to take a peek out through a grille.

After a while I knew I was getting close. I could hear voices just ahead. A little farther, sneaking along cautious on my hands and knees, and I could identify them: Connor Bryan and Rory O'Donovan. Two of the general crew and, in my humble opinion, far from the smartest people on the ship.

In another few seconds I could see them, or at least I could see their legs. They were sitting close together, and they were talking, but not about me or
Paddy's Fortune
or the Godspeed Drive.

"Big and fat and pale-skinned," Connor Bryan was saying. "Big chest, big belly, big hips. None of your stick figures for me. I want something blond and buxom and wide enough to wallow in."

O'Donovan laughed. "That's all right, then, we won't be competing. Give me red hair, nice and slim, with smooth hips and long legs. Sort of like the one we'd have had in that house by the lake—except we had to leave before we could even get started."

"She wasn't bad. But she was old. Older than me, for a bet. I want something young."

"She wasn't old. She was middling. Middling can be better—if it comes with
lots
of experience."

They were silent for a moment. "But they won't have experience, any of them," Connor Bryan said at last. "If it's nothing but women, with never a man to share out among them for a century, how can any of them have any experience at all?"

"Dunno," said O'Donovan. "I guess you and me will have to teach 'em." They both laughed, then O'Donovan added in a quieter voice. "
If
any of it is real."

"Paddy Enderton was sure of it."

"Aye, and look what pleasure it brought Black Paddy. Running for his life at the end, then stiff and staring. I wonder if he was lying about everything. It's hard to believe, thousands of women and no men. Sounds like a fairy tale."

"Doesn't it, though? But we'll find out soon enough. Come on."

I hadn't taken much notice of the last few sentences, because at the words "Paddy Enderton" I had jerked up and banged my head on the duct ceiling. Fortunately they didn't notice. Connor Bryan was standing up and saying, "Let's go see the chief. He's supposed to be getting reports back soon."

As they left the room I turned myself so that I could sit crosslegged.
Paddy Enderton!
They had said the name, when they were not supposed to have heard of him. And they knew that he was dead. Suddenly I realized who that "middling old" red-haired woman might be.

But all the other talk of women made absolutely no sense. We were billions of miles away from Erin and women. Also, there had been never a word said between Bryan and O'Donovan about Godspeed Base, although that was the whole point of our journey to
Paddy's Fortune.

Maybe the wise thing would have been to head back to our living quarters at that point, and ponder what I had heard. But from their talk it was quite clear that they were going to a meeting with Danny Shaker, and something new about
Paddy's Fortune
was likely to come from it.

I examined my palms (grimy), rubbed my knees (a bit chafed, after all the crawling), and pressed on through the air duct system.

Finding a particular cabin or chamber was much harder than just crawling in one direction. The ducts divided from time to time, and I didn't know which branch to follow. I seemed to go on scrambling around forever, to and fro in the darkness, and after half an hour or so I was tired. I stopped and took a rest. I was ready to give up. That's when I heard faint voices somewhere ahead of me.

I crawled forward, reached one more branch point, and took the duct in the direction of the sound.

Even before I got there I could tell that an argument was going on. Voices were raised, and people were interrupting each other.