Godspeed (20 page)

"He stayed with us for a while—me and my mother."

"How's old Paddy doing?"

"He's dead."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Shaker frowned down at me. "But you know, I'm starting to put things together. Paddy Enderton—
Paddy's Fortune.
"

"How did you know it was called that?—the world, I mean, the one we're near."

"Why, from Duncan West. He called it that name a couple of times."

So much for total secrecy. But Danny Shaker was continuing, "As I say, this all begins to make some sense. You're probably going to hear bits and pieces anyway, from other crew members, so you might as well hear the whole thing from me. I wasn't being totally honest with you a moment ago. Paddy wasn't just the navigation officer for the
Cuchulain;
he also deserted the ship. Under very odd circumstances."

Shaker sat down again, and patted the bunk beside him. "Sit down, Jay."

I did, and he went on, "We were out in open space, eight months ago, when suddenly our radar picked up an artificial signal. An odd one, too, not like the usual identification for a Forty Worlds vessel. We headed that way—anything unusual can be valuable. It didn't respond to our messages, so when we got close enough Paddy Enderton took off in one of our cargo beetles. Alone. He reported back that it was just a little ship, not the sort of thing that was designed for long interplanetary travel, and he would try to board it.

"He managed to dock, and he went inside. That's when things turned strange. He called on a standard communication frequency, to say that he was aboard a two-man scoutship, and the crew were both dead. But it wasn't a two-man crew at all, he said; it was a
two-woman
crew. If you know anything about the rules, written and unwritten, for women in space, you'll realize that what Paddy was telling us was just about impossible.

"After that there was a twelve-hour radio silence. Just about the time that I was ready to call Paddy and tell him to return with or without the scoutship, its drive went on at high acceleration. There was no chance at all that the
Cuchulain
could catch it, even if we'd been all powered up and ready to go. We never heard one more word from Paddy Enderton. I thought at first that he'd been carried off in some sort of accident that turned on the drive. But when we finally arrived back at Muldoon Port, months later, we learned that he had been through there. He had gone to ground somewhere, no one could tell us where. We decided that Paddy must have found something valuable on board the scoutship, and wanted to keep it all for himself. But there was no reason to think that the 'something valuable' might be
out in space
—until now."

"What do you think it is?" I was intrigued in spite of myself.

"Well, it's supposed to be something on
Paddy's Fortune.
That's clear enough. The crew think it must be women. That's partly because Paddy Enderton said he found two women on the ship he stole, and partly because that's what spacer crews think about half the time—make that three-quarters of the time—while they're out in space. But you ask me, what do I think? Well, I prefer not to speculate. Not when you and I can be over there to see for ourselves in an hour."

I was ready to go, and not just because his words were making me more and more curious to see
Paddy's Fortune
at first hand. It had also occurred to me that I couldn't be
more
under the control of Danny Shaker and the crew of the
Cuchulain,
no matter what happened. And if he indeed took me down to be with Doctor Eileen and Duncan West and our two scientists, I would be much safer there than I was here.

Maybe Danny Shaker knew that's how my thoughts would run. Certainly, he did not say one more word about women or Paddy Enderton while I was eating, or grabbing a little bag of necessities in case I had to stay down on the worldlet for a day or two. We boarded a cargo beetle. Then he looked at me and past me, and said, "In case we need extra muscle-power for any reason."

Behind me, four more men were crowding through the beetle's little port. Patrick O'Rourke, Robert Doonan, Joseph Munroe, and Sean Wilgus. I could understand that the first two made sense, but I wondered if Shaker wasn't inviting trouble by taking Wilgus and Munroe. They were the ones who had been openly critical of him only a few hours earlier. Was Shaker doing it
deliberately,
to point out to me and to them that he was completely confident of his authority?

Either way, not one of them said a word when they were inside the beetle, though Joe Munroe gave me a very hard stare, as though to say, what the devil are
you
doing here?

I did plenty of staring of my own. Not at the men, but at what they were carrying: guns, and deadly looking knives.

Danny Shaker saw me flinch. "Something wrong, Jay?"

"The weapons. Why are you taking those with you?"

"For exactly the same reason that Doctor Xavier and your friends took theirs, at my recommendation. When you are heading for a place that supports life, and you don't know what you might encounter, you don't take risks.
Paddy's Fortune
may be dangerous."

"But Doctor Eileen is already over there. She must know that's not true."

"Ah, I forgot that you'd been out of the loop, so to speak, for a few hours. When we talked with the doctor, she didn't say that at all. I'll tap us into the
Cuchulain
data banks while we're on our way across, and you can listen for yourself."

It was a strange experience, to hear Doctor Eileen's voice in my ear describing their approach to
Paddy's Fortune,
while the little world itself grew steadily before my eyes. The recording put her about ten minutes ahead of us, so that when we still had twenty kilometers to go she was already describing their flight low over the translucent shield, seeking an entry point. By the time we got there, she was describing the touchdown on the real surface. Her actual recording had included video, but I was getting only sound, so what I heard was not too satisfactory. But it was clear from Doctor Eileen's words that they had emerged to stand on a tiny world with very low gravity, a perfectly breathable atmosphere—and vegetation denser than anywhere on Erin except right at the equator.

"The best word to describe it is
jungle,
" said Doctor Eileen's voice in my ear. A disappointed voice, I thought. What she was seeing did not match her ideas of Godspeed Base. "It's a consequence of the low gravity, which does almost nothing to constrain upward growth. As you will observe, moving around is not going to be easy. Exploring may take us far longer than we expected. We are going to stay together and concentrate our firepower until we know that nothing dangerous is here. We are not sure yet that there is animal life, but we think there must be. Dr. Swift heard something moving off through that patch of thorns you can see in front of us."

I, of course, could not see that. What I saw was the curve of the little world itself, as our cargo beetle floated around it. We had negotiated the upper shield through a lock that worked itself automatically at our approach. Whatever it was that kept
Paddy's Fortune
operating and with an atmosphere right for humans was still doing fine. Soon we were within a hundred feet of the actual surface.

But I couldn't see that surface at all. What I saw was growing plants, apparently covering every square inch. It was only when we came lower that I noticed little pools of water, washbasin-sized, with lines of flattened growth running between them like animal trails. But there was no sign of the animals themselves.

The worldlet was turning on its axis and, as I watched, parts of it slipped away into shade for a brief night. The whole daylight period could be no more than an hour or two. I had a sudden vision of an accelerated world, with animals catching brief half-hour naps between nightfall and a new dawn. Then I realized that part of the world, what I imagined as its "north pole," was going to remain in shadow for a long time. Maveen was to the south, and would not illuminate much of the north at this time of year. Did animals—if there were animals—migrate south, to enjoy a season of perpetual sun? Or head north, to hibernate? It would not be a difficult journey, because the whole distance from north pole to south pole was no more than an hour's walk.

Assuming that you
could
walk, through such unbroken vegetation. Even from a hundred feet or less, I could not estimate the height of the plants. I had to take Doctor Eileen's word that it was difficult going.

I was not the only one peering down with huge curiosity. The four crew members were just as interested. Sean Wilgus was actually licking his lips in sheer excitement and anticipation, something I had never seen anyone do before outside of a theater show. Only Danny Shaker stayed at the controls, bringing us in for a gentle landing that nonetheless crushed a broad circle of tall succulent plants with spiky purple flowers.

He had no choice.
Paddy's Fortune,
at least to my first inspection, was
all
vegetation. Doctor Eileen had been forced to flatten a patch, too, when they landed. No wonder she was disappointed. An industrial world, as she had pointed out to me on the journey to the Maze, should show signs of that industry even from a distance. The transparent shield around
Paddy's Fortune
supported that idea. But now—this.

We opened the port of the beetle, and squeezed through one by one to stand on soft black soil. I at once found myself at a disadvantage. The surface was level enough, but the plants were head-high—
my
head. Shaker and the other crew members could see over the tops of the plants. My view was limited to green leaves and purple flowers.

And something else. I reached out and picked a tiny object from the underside of one of the leaves. I held it out to show it to Pat O'Rourke.

"Look. Some sort of bug. There
is
animal life."

He glanced at it without the slightest interest. "Yeah. We know that. The other party showed us bugs."

I had heard only a small fraction of the recordings sent back by Doctor Eileen. I put the little green multilegged creature on a leaf, and turned back to explain the reason for my ignorance to Patrick O'Rourke.

He had vanished.

I could see the way that he had gone, from a few broken plants among the whole mass of springy vegetation. I took three steps in that direction, and suddenly I was right behind him again. It proved how easy it was to get lost—at least for me.

The others probably did not have that problem. Patrick O'Rourke seemed to know where he was going, and other sounds were coming from each side of me. Sean Wilgus was cursing at something black and sticky that he had trodden in, while Robert Doonan, easily the most broken-winded of the crew, was wheezing and grunting in front of him.

"How much farther, dammit?" he complained. "I thought you said we—aha, about time."

Within a few more steps I understood that mysterious comment. I emerged abruptly from green and purple jungle, to a place where the plants grew less than knee high. Danny Shaker and Robert Doonan were already waiting. I hardly gave them one glance, because standing there also, to my huge relief, was Doctor Eileen.

I don't think I was ever so pleased to see anyone in my whole life. It must have shown, because as I ran to her side she shot me a funny look and said, "What's the good news?"

I don't think she cared whether I answered or not. I was sure pleased to be with her, but from the look of it she wasn't all that happy to see me. She turned to Danny Shaker without waiting for my reply.

"What's this, Captain? You never told me that you were bringing Jay with you. I'm not sure this place is safe."

"Safer for him than the
Cuchulain,
when I'm not there. I'll vouch for that." And, when she stared at him, "You know my crew, Doctor. They're hardworking and they're well-seasoned. But they're a rough lot, and one thing no spacer will stand is a spy. I'm sorry to tell you that the crewmen are convinced that Jay has been spying on them. Crawling through the air supply system, snooping around, listening in on private conversations."

"Nonsense! Wriggling along air pipes? I'm sure he did no such thing." Doctor Eileen turned back to me. "Did you, Jay?"

"Well . . . I did—but it wasn't like that at all. You see, I heard them talking about women—"

"And when did spacers ever talk about anything else?" Shaker glanced across at the four crew, who had slumped down on the soft earth half a dozen paces away. He stepped closer to Eileen Xavier and lowered his voice. "I'm going to be honest with you, Doctor, even though you'll maybe think the less of me for it. Privacy in space is hard to come by, and spying on your shipmates is one of the very worst things you can do."

"But I wasn't—"

"Shush, Jay." Doctor Eileen waved her hand, but she didn't look at me.

"They
thought you
were spying," Danny Shaker said, "and that's what matters. The way the men were talking after they found Jay in the air ducts, that was real ugly."

"But
you
were the one—"

"Jay!"

It was useless, she would believe him more than she would me.

"Some were even suggesting space-walking him." Shaker shook his head ruefully. "I had trouble controlling them—as Jay himself can tell you. And I certainly wasn't sure enough of myself to leave him
behind
when I came down here. I brought him along for his own safety."

It was ridiculous. But the odd thing is that I almost believed it myself, the way Danny Shaker said it. Doctor Eileen certainly did. She sighed, and shook her head.

"Jay, I'm sure you didn't mean any harm. But you should have known better. What now, Captain Shaker?"

"A little breathing space, I think, to let the crew back on board calm down. Jay ought to stay here for a day or two. And if you don't mind, I'd like to ask one favor of you."

"Anything within reason."

"It's the men. Part of the reason they're so angry has nothing to do with Jay's snooping. He was quite right, you see, the crew
have
been talking about women—because they've got the odd notion in their heads that was why you came here in the first place."