Godspeed (36 page)

"Can you?" Mel swung to stare at me, her eyes wide. "He can't, but
can you?
Or have you been boasting to me?"

"I can. I'm sure I can. I
know
I can." I felt dizzy and breathless as I turned to head for the staircase. "Come on. Quick."

Before I change my mind and decide I can't.

* * *

One twenty-minute lesson, weeks and weeks ago. It couldn't be enough. But I was not about to admit to Mel that I had been laying it on a bit thick. I squeezed my eyes shut and told myself that I was a natural spacer. Hadn't I heard it from Paddy Enderton, and the same from Danny Shaker?

"Come
on,
" said Mel's voice from beside me. "What are you waiting for? Let's go."

Death before dishonor. I opened my eyes. I placed my fingers on the control keys. I took a deep breath. And I flew the cargo beetle. Out of the hold, away into open space, our destination the distant blip of the space base's least significant lobe.

As we moved clear of the
Cuchulain
—and I couldn't help wondering what Donald Rudden would make of our sudden appearance—I noticed something that should have struck me from inside the ship. The stars were visible. From the outside, the anomaly had been opaque.

I asked Jim Swift how that was possible, and he started on an explanation that involved one-way membranes and thermalization. He probably thought he was being crystal clear, but before he was half-done I had given up and put all my mind into flying the beetle.

Space felt unbelievably huge, our target supernaturally small and remote. I don't think our trajectory would have won any prizes for either speed or minimum distance, and it was a few minutes before I was sure that we were going anywhere at all. But we were getting there. The base was growing on the screen. Soon I could see more details in each part, although no matter what I did I couldn't get a clear view of that middle lobe. It was like trying to see through a dense, patchy fog, details coming and going as you watched. I became convinced that the surface must be more translucent than transparent, like the covering on
Paddy's Fortune.

At last I had to give up staring, because the third lobe was looming ahead. It had its own port, a tiny one in keeping with its overall proportions. But "tiny" was relative. It was quite big enough for the cargo beetle to creep inside. Once we were there we hung stationary, the three of us peering into the lobe's rounded interior.

We couldn't see a thing. It was pitch-black inside the ovoid. If we wanted an interior look I first had to learn how to work the external searchlight on the cargo beetle. Its pointing stability mechanism was—naturally—broken. That meant another five minutes of frustration, while I struggled to control a wildly oscillating beam of blue-green light.

Mel Fury and Jim Swift had an advantage over me. They didn't have the problem of controlling the instrument, so they could spend all their time watching what was in its beam—and giving me confusing and conflicting instructions.

"Stop it right there!" "No, dummy, don't go that way." "Back up, you had it right before." "Swing it farther over!"

I finally got the beam steadied—no thanks to them. What it showed did not look promising. Square in the searchlight floated a fat corkscrew with a distorted bubble attached to its blunt end. Thin wires held the structure in position and threw off metallic reflections.

It was like no ship I had ever seen or imagined. I was beginning to swing the light in search of a more promising target when Jim Swift howled in protest. "Don't move it, you moron. You have it right there."

It's great to be appreciated. I swore I'd get even with him—sometime, but not now. He was already heading for the airlock.

Even for newcomers to suited flight, the trip across to the object gleaming in the searchlight should take no more than a few minutes. We fixed our suit helmets into position, Mel with my assistance. I pumped the interior of the cargo beetle and waited for the pressure to reduce. At the hatch Jim Swift cursed and swore at how long it took. For a change I could sympathize with him. After so many weeks, those last few minutes were the hardest to take.

The object of our attention did not impress me, even when we closed in on it. The corkscrew was just that, a smooth helix with no external features. The deformed oval bubble was hardly bigger than our cargo beetle. A square port occupied almost all one end of it.

No one had spoken a word since we left the beetle. Now, drawing closer to the port, we halted in unison a few yards away. I suspect we were all thinking the same thing. According to everything we knew about the Isolation, this structure had hung in space, unvisited, for hundreds of years. Inside we might find anything—gutted and empty cabins, crumbling equipment, long-dead corpses of a Godspeed crew.

Mel broke the spell. "Well, we won't find out floating around here. Let's do it." And away she went, heading straight for the port.

The Net, the Needle, the Eye, the Godspeed Base: isolated in space, drifting deep within the protective chaos of the Maze. It should have been totally alien. It wasn't. The port, when we came to open it, was no different from those on the
Cuchulain.

I realized that the
Cuchulain
and every other ship that flew the Forty Worlds drew from the technology that built this space base. But the masters of that technology were long vanished, along with the instruction manuals. No wonder that Danny Shaker and the rest of the spacers had problems maintaining their ships in working order.

Then we were inside, and I had no time for ghosts of the past. We were entering what was clearly a control room. Unlike any control room that I had seen, everything within seemed fresh and unused as a newly minted coin.

Jim Swift didn't waste his energy marveling. He turned to me. "Do you know how to get air pressure in here? It's a pain working inside these suits."

"I'll see." I had become our space travel and spaceship expert. Fortunately, the controls here were as simple as those of the cargo beetle. I keyed in a sequence that should seal the lock and provide air, then stood wondering. The equipment looked new, but it hadn't been used for an age. The seal was complete, and the interior was filling with gas. But suppose that after all this time it had become poisonous or unbreathable?

Mel was beginning to fiddle with her helmet seals. She and Jim Swift had to be the two least patient people in the whole Maveen system.

"Wait a second."

I checked my suit monitors. It was not quite Erin standard atmosphere, but close to it. If there was trouble it would come from subtle poisonous fractions, beyond the ability of the suit to detect and measure them.

Death before dishonor again. I cracked my helmet open and took a shallow, nervous breath. It didn't smell right, but I didn't collapse or go off in a fit. After a few seconds I nodded. "All right."

Before the words were out of my mouth Jim Swift was wriggling from his suit and heading for the pilot's chair. "Told you," he said. "Look at those."

His voice was triumphant as he pointed to a meaningless array of switches, keys and dials.

"What are they?" Mel was out of her suit, too, hovering right behind him. "I've never seen anything like them."

"Nor have I. But I've read enough descriptions, in the old pre-Isolation literature." He touched one array lovingly. "This is a coordinate selector."

I looked over his shoulder. "Not like the one on the
Cuchulain.
"

"No. Because these are for
stellar
coordinates. You enter other stars as destinations." He leaned back and took a deep breath. "We're sitting in a ship with a Godspeed Drive. I'll only say this one time: Jim Swift, you're a genius."

"Mm." Mel's tone seemed to offer a second opinion. "So you can fly this ship?"

He turned to glare at her. "That's a dumb spacer's job. Jay can do it, or one of Shaker's tame monkeys. Anyway, even if I
could
fly it, I'd want to take a good look at everything before I'd think of turning on full power. The Godspeed Drive can be really dangerous. It works by taking liberties with spacetime structure, and that sort of thing doesn't come free. Remember,
something
stopped the Godspeed ships from flying to the Forty Worlds."

Mel nodded and said, "Well, if we don't fly it, what do we do with it?"

"We loose it from its moorings and haul it back to the
Cuchulain.
Then we go over the whole ship in detail.
After
that we make the run home to Erin, before we try anything ambitious." He turned to me. "You can handle the towing, can't you, Jay?"

"Well—"

"Good. Let's get on with it." Jim Swift turned away from me, placed his hands behind his head, and leaned back luxuriously in the pilot's chair. "And when Shaker and his crew of incompetents get back from bumbling around in the rest of the space base, I guess we'll let them examine this ship. Under my supervision, of course."

Of course.

I started to worry about how I was going to loose those metallic wires that held the ship in place, and how it could be balanced for hauling. I had never done anything remotely like it, and I wasn't sure where to begin. But at the same time I couldn't help contemplating—and looking forward to—the prospect of snotty Jim Swift "supervising" Danny Shaker.

CHAPTER 28

Our trip out from the
Cuchulain
had been no great triumph of ship manoeuvering. Compared with our return it was a masterpiece. After endless effort I managed to free from its moorings the corkscrew ship—I still found it hard to think of that misshapen object as a home for the Godspeed Drive. More hard labor attached our prize to the cargo beetle. But what I could not do was balance masses, and once we were under way we yawed and rolled this way and that in every direction that I could imagine. Sometimes the hawsers were taut, sometimes they floated slack and then tightened with a great jerk. Sometimes, don't ask how, the Godspeed ship we were towing flew out ahead of us.

I was not pleased with my performance, and Mel was outright rude. But Jim Swift didn't say one bad word. He was so full of the idea that we had
succeeded.
When we got back to the
Cuchulain
we would be hailed by the others as conquering heroes.

I wasn't so sure. If the crew of the
Cuchulain
had found a Godspeed Drive for themselves in their search of the space base, then what we had done was no big deal. If they had found nothing, we had made them look like a bunch of lamebrains. Dr. Jim Swift was a lot older than me, but in my experience you didn't become popular by showing people what fools they were.

Donald Rudden confirmed my opinion when we called him on the beetle's communicator, to say we were going to moor the object we were towing alongside the
Cuchulain.
"Wondered where you'd got to. Found something, have you?" He laughed. "Just as well, because Tom Toole called a while ago. Said they'd come up with nothing. Crew's all as mad as a pack of Limerick pipers. They'll be on their way back any time now."

That gave me one more thing to worry about. I had to get Mel on board the
Cuchulain
and safely into Doctor Eileen's quarters before the other party returned. Jim was too full of himself to worry about that or much else, so as soon as I had fought us to a rough docking I left him to gloat. I steered the beetle to the
Cuchulain
's cargo region, and Mel and I made a quick run through the interior to Eileen Xavier's empty rooms.

"Sit tight," I said as I left her. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

"How long?"

"Don't know. But hang in. We'll soon be on our way home."

I was at last beginning to believe it myself. It's an odd thing, but when you wait for something long enough you can't believe it has arrived, even when it does. But Jim Swift, in spite of his uncontrollable temper, was Erin's top expert on the Godspeed Drive. If
he
was convinced that the oddity hanging next to the
Cuchulain
had inside it a device able to bring the stars close enough to touch, who was I to question?

As for his worries about disturbing space-time, I dismissed them. He had been dwelling too much on his own specialty subject. Jim with his space-time obsession was like the Lake Sheelin fishermen, who saw all the whole world in terms of hooks, lines, baits, and nets.

By the time that I returned to the
Cuchulain
's bridge, Donald Rudden was showing signs of stirring. "Chief's on his way over there," he said. He nodded his head to a display screen showing the corkscrew ship, hanging where Mel and I had left it. "And I hafta go over myself, with some tools they want. Rory's supposed to spell me here."

That wasn't good news. Rory O'Donovan was the worst possible choice—not very bright, but full of energy. I couldn't trust him to stay put in the control room.

"What's going on at the other ship?"

"That thing's a ship?" Rudden puffed out his cheeks. "I'll believe it when I see it fly. Anyway, Rory says there's hell to pay over there. That redhead friend of yours, Swift, he's full of it. Been laying down the law about ships and drives. He don't know beans about ships, and anyway the lads won't take that stuff from a Downsider. He's been warned twice by Pat O'Rourke, but he takes no mind."

I wondered if Jim Swift knew how much danger he was in. After seeing Walter Hamilton shot, I wouldn't argue with an angry crewman. The only thing Jim had protecting him was Danny Shaker's control of the crew—a control that Shaker said became less every day.

As soon as Rudden left the bridge I made another quick run for the top level. I had to tell Mel what was happening, and warn her to lie low once O'Donovan was aboard and running loose. She didn't take it well.

"I've had it with skulking away. You say hang in, but when do I get
out?
"

"Soon. But
don't take risks.
"

I headed for the control room, wondering when I was going to take my own advice. Every trip to the upper level was a risk, for me as well as Mel.

When I reached the bridge Rory O'Donovan was not there, but Doctor Eileen was, staring at the displays. Her shoulders were slumped and she seemed half-asleep. She knew I was present, though, because as I moved to her side she said, "Jay," in a far-off voice, as though I was some sort of ghost.