Godspeed (19 page)

"—at the place. What more do we need?
We
should be down there, not them."

I recognized the voice. It was Sean Wilgus, a slim, sly-faced man who was unpopular because he acted as though he was superior to everyone. But now there was a murmur of agreement.

"I have to second that." It sounded like Patrick O'Rourke. "You said, be patient. But we
have
been patient. And now we're here. What more is there to be patient about?"

"You've got it backwards." It was Danny Shaker, calm and reasonable-sounding as ever. "You tell me what the rush is. We're not going anywhere. They
can't
go anywhere without us."

"So what?" Sean Wilgus again. "They've served their purpose. We don't need them, we haven't needed them since the second day out, when she told you the destination. I agree with Joe, we should have dumped them out the lock right then and there."

"Right," Danny Shaker said. "Very intelligent. We let them all breathe space, and then when we get to the coordinates she gave us, we find that she held back a little bit of information, and we're sitting in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do next. It's not like you to be so trusting, Sean. She's old, but she's nobody's fool. Until we actually got here, there was no guarantee she wasn't playing her own game."

"But we
did
get here." That was Joe Munroe, surly as always. "After we arrived there was no reason to wait one minute more. But still you insisted we do nothing. You let
them
go down and explore the woman-world, instead of us. Why?"

"Use your brain, Joe," Shaker said. "You have it backwards. You should ask, why
not
let them explore? They're not
expecting
to find women down there, I told you that. So if they do, they'll surely call back here and tell us. And then we'll act."

"Maybe we will. And maybe not. Maybe some people here are getting soft."

There was a dead silence on the other side of the partition. I peered through the grille, but I could see little. The last speaker had been Joe Munroe. From the way that Danny Shaker's voice varied, I knew that he was on his feet and pacing about, as he often did in conversation.

"Are you by any chance referring to me, Joe?" he said at last. "You ought to know better. I don't shy away from
necessary
death. But if they don't find what we want—if there's nothing interesting or valuable down there—why, then, we'd be fools to kill anyone. We'll take them back to Erin, get triple pay for winter work like a good, dutiful crew, and go our way."

"That may be all right for you," Sean Wilgus said. "You've got your own tastes and preferences. You and that bloody boy, you ought to form a mutual admiration society. But what about the rest of us? You drag us away from the women on Erin, with Paddy Enderton's promise of thousands. And now you keep us away from them. We could all be down there. We could maybe be having a woman apiece, this very minute."

"Ah, Sean Wilgus," Shaker said softly. "I don't like to hear that sort of thing from you. 'Your own tastes and preferences,' indeed. That kind of remark doesn't do you justice. It's a good thing I'm so fond of you, or I might feel tempted to do something about it. But you know I love you—love you as much as if you were my own dear brother."

There was a deadly silence. All movement in the room ceased.

"No, Chief." Wilgus's voice rose an octave. "I'm sorry. I misspoke. All I meant was, I wish I could be down there exploring the woman-world—we all feel that way. But I'm not questioning your judgment. None of us are. We never would. Right?"

There was a mutter of assent.

"Well, that's good to know." Danny Shaker laughed. He sounded very close. "Because, you see, I'm going to exercise my judgment again, right now, and it's nice to know you won't question it. If you hadn't given me that assurance, Sean, I think maybe you'd want to act differently when I show you—
this.
"

Before I knew what was happening the grille in front of me was whisked away. A hand reached in, grabbed me by the hair, and hauled me through into the control room.

"You see, men," Danny Shaker moved his grip to my arms, and pulled me forward to the middle of the group. "When you get right down to it, most things are a question of judgment. So here's a judgment test for you. Suppose that you find a little surprise like this in the air duct system."

He glanced at me and shook his head. "Jay, I told you that you'll make a first-rate spacer, and I stick with that evaluation. But you have to learn a few things first. For example, there's nothing on a ship more important than the air supply system. Anything that changes the air flow pattern, like a foreign body in the duct system, will flag an alarm on the control board, even if it's not dangerous." He gestured to the banks of displays on one wall of the room. "Maybe no one else noticed, but I've been tracking you for an hour."

He turned back to the watching circle of men. "So, as I say, you find this little surprise, and you ask, how much did he hear? We can't be sure. So what do we do with him?"

No one spoke. But I looked from face to face, and saw murder on every one.

So must have Danny Shaker, because he laughed again and said, "Out of the lock, eh, for a bracing whiff of vacuum? Let's think about that for a moment. Suppose we dump him, which is a natural temptation. Then it's no more Jay Hara. And good riddance, you might say.

"But wait a minute. Once Jay is dead, there's no bringing him back. Now, maybe you can think of cases where a man might be more useful dead than alive—I certainly can. . . ."

He stood up straight with his arms crossed, absent-mindedly kneading his biceps through his spacer's jacket. There was a kind of group flinch, as everyone around him winced and drew back.

"But we'll all admit that's a rare event," Shaker went on. "A dead Jay Hara is probably worth nothing to anyone. But a
live
Jay Hara is a valuable item in negotiation. Why do you think I wanted him here with us, when the others went exploring? What negotiation, you ask me? I don't know, I reply. But since there's no
risk
in keeping him alive, I'll take the possible value of a live something over the guaranteed zero value of a dead one." Shaker glanced around him. "Now, is there anyone who would like to debate my analysis? Or relate it in any way to my
tastes and preferences?
"

There was not a word, not even a murmur of assent.

"So I guess we keep him," Shaker said. "Tom?"

Tom Toole stepped forward. "Yes, Chief?"

"Number Four confinement cabin. Locked, of course." Shaker turned back to me. "This will be much more of a challenge, Jay. The brig has five-inch air ducts, solid door and walls, vacuum beyond. So far as I know, no one has ever managed to get out of a Number Four cabin and live. Don't let that discourage you from trying, though—ingenuity and persistence bring their own rewards. All right, Tom. Take him."

Tom Toole twisted my right arm painfully up behind my back and grabbed the nape of my neck, which was still sore from Patrick O'Rourke's earlier grip. He marched me out of the control room and off toward the front of the spherical living region. It was a part that I had visited only on my first general tour of the ship with Danny Shaker. "You're hurting," I complained.

"You don't know how lucky you are to be around to be hurting," he said. "The chief' a deep one. With anyone on board but him in charges—me included—you'd be gone. Aye, and before that I thought that Sean Wilgus was going, too. What with him taking on the chief, and then that 'I love you like a brother' bit."

"Does Danny Shaker have a brother? A twin brother? Are they the two-half-man?"

I didn't expect answers, and certainly not the ones I received.

"Of course they are," Tom Toole said cheerfully. "Or were. Where else do you think the chief got his arms?"

"You mean Danny Shaker's arms used to belong to Stan Shaker?"

"You heard the chief say he didn't shy away from necessary death, and he could think of cases where a man might be more useful dead than alive. That was a good example. Stan Shaker was never the man that Dan is."

"You mean that his brother didn't just die—Shaker had him
killed?
"

"Well, you don't think Stan
volunteered
to give away his arms, do you? His own preference would have been to take his brother's legs." Tom Toole laughed, as we reached the door of the cabin and he opened it. "Ah, that was a fine piece of planning. Stan didn't just have to die, you see, he had to die at exactly the right time and place, when an operating team was in position and ready to go to work. That took real organization."

I was thrown into the room and staggered forward to hit a hard wall only a few feet away. The door was already closing when I turned back to Tom Toole.

"Danny Shaker killed his own twin brother! He stole his arms, and destroyed the rest of the body!"

"Now when did I say any such thing?" Tom Toole's tone was reproving. "The chief killed brother Stan, sure enough, and he did take his arms. But I'll wager good money that he didn't destroy the rest of the body, although I've never asked him about it. I'm sure he's got it tucked away in cold storage somewhere out in the Forty Worlds. He can't tell, you see, when he might be needing another few bits and pieces. I say it again, the chief is a deep one."

The door slammed shut, leaving me in darkness. I lay on the floor, just where I had been standing. Even had there been light, I would not have had the strength to explore my cell.

Paddy Enderton had told me, long ago, of his fears. Now, at last, I shared them.

CHAPTER 16

The confinement cabin showed me a new side of spacer life. I don't mean the rock-hard bunk, which in low gravity was no hardship at all. I don't mean the dim lighting, either, or the sanitary facilities. None of those worried me a bit, because they were little different from ordinary crew quarters.

The difference was simple, but enormous: The confinement cabin offered
no emergency exit.
If a failure of any kind occurred on the ship, and no one came to let a prisoner out, that was the end. He would die. And it was clear to me that no one on board worried about that for one second. To them it was just part of the rules that a spacer lived with, and sometimes died with.

I lay in near-darkness, half-asleep, wondering what was going to happen to me. The cabin had running water to drink, but no food. Doctor Eileen and the others might be away on
Paddy's Fortune
for days and days. Unless Danny Shaker gave explicit instructions to some crew member to feed me, I might starve. I could not see Joe Munroe or his buddies bringing me a meal from the goodness of their hearts. In fact, given a choice they would not only let me die of hunger—they would like to hurry it along.

So I had very mixed feelings when the door opened, and I found myself squinting in the bright light at a figure who stood on the threshold.

"Good news, Jay." It was Danny Shaker, as cheerful as ever. "Come on. I know you've been aching since we got here to take a trip across to
Paddy's Fortune
—we might as well all call it that now, though I can hardly think of a worse name for it. We're going there, as soon as you've had something to eat."

I had come to my feet at once when he entered, with some ridiculous idea of overpowering him. But I didn't move toward him, and not just because he was a lot bigger and stronger than me. I was afraid.

"You killed your brother," I said. "You killed Stan Shaker."

"What!" He stared at me, the smooth high forehead wrinkling. And then he laughed aloud, throwing his head back so that I could easily have reached forward and slashed his smooth throat. If I'd had a knife, which of course I did not. But he could not have been sure of that.

"Jay, Jay," he said. "What have you been dreaming, to keep you awake at nights?"

"You killed your brother. You stole his arms."

"Who told you that?"

"Tom Toole. And don't say he was just making it up to scare me. He believes it, himself."

Danny Shaker walked casually past me and sat down on the bunk. "That's good. I hope the whole crew feels the same way." And, as I gaped at him, "Jay, I still say you'll make a great spacer, but you have an awful lot to learn. You've seen the crew of the
Cuchulain,
every one of them. You know they're tough men, and they're rough men, and there isn't one of them who couldn't tackle me and destroy me, if he decided to try it. True?"

"True." I didn't know what he was getting at, but he sounded so relaxed it was difficult to stay scared.

"But they don't, Jay.
Why
don't they? I'll tell you why, it's because they don't
dare.
You see, all that nonsense about me and my poor dead brother—Stan was killed in the same accident where I was injured, the one where I came close to losing my arms—it's not just that I
permit
nonsense like that to be muttered all around the ship, and all around Muldoon Spaceport. I
encourage
it. I like Tom Toole to tell people I'm a monster. That way anyone, like maybe Sean Wilgus, who has a mind to take on Danny Shaker, will think twice before he actually starts anything. Here's a great truth for you, Jay: Authority doesn't come from a piece of paper, or the way that you behave; it's all defined by the way that
others behave toward you.
"

He stood up.

"We ought to be going. I talked to Doctor Xavier, not more than half an hour ago, and promised that I would be down shortly."

I still hesitated.

"Look," he said, "I happen to think that Doctor Eileen Xavier is one very smart woman, and I believe that you do, too. When you and I get over there, why don't you talk to her about all this dead-men's-arms stuff, and see what she says?"

"I already did."

"You did? Well, what did she tell you?"

I was silent for a few moments, until Danny Shaker stared at my face and started to laugh. "Didn't buy it, did she?"

"No, she didn't." I took a wild shot. "Did you ever hear of a man called Paddy Enderton?"

It produced a reaction, but not one that I was expecting. Shaker looked thoughtful, and said, "Black Paddy? I certainly did. I know him well. He used to be navigation officer of the
Cuchulain.
How did
you
ever hear of him?"