Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 14

The next day the cleaning robots went into the room where we had been and scrubbed, vacuumed, and polished it spotless. I know, because I went there especially to check.

Duncan didn’t bother to go with me. He knew his fix would work. It was the knack.

He did a couple of other small jobs for Danny Shaker, but the big one came four days later.

Shaker appeared early in the morning—the ship kept Erin time—in our living quarters.

“I know some of you are going to hate this,” he said, “but we have to go to free-fall conditions for five or six hours. We have a slight drive imbalance, and it’s costing us time and energy. We’re going to do a partial strip-down and take a look.” He glanced at Duncan. “You’d be welcome.” And then to me, seeing my longing expression, “You, too, Jay, if you want. You said that you’d like to see the drive close up.”

I had, and I did. But I couldn’t go with them at once, because I had promised to help Jim Swift move things out of a spare cabin filled with junk. He had been sharing a place with Walter Hamilton, which was no new experience for either of them, except that now Jim complained that in low gravity his cabin companion snored like a handsaw.

The drive went off while we were in the middle of the move, and working in free-fall slowed us down a lot. Nothing would stay where we put it! It was forty minutes after the drive went off before I started along the column that led aft from the living section through he empty and collapsed cargo hold, and on toward the drive area. On the way I paused to take another look at a cargo beetle, clamped to the column. The controls inside looked so easy. I wondered if one day I might get to fly one.

No use asking Patrick O’Rourke, that was sure. I didn’t know why, but he glared at me from his great height whenever he saw me, as though I was some sort of ship’s vermin scuttling along at his feet. But maybe Danny Shaker or Tom Toole would let me fly.

The rear compartment when I came to it was dark and gloomy. It was frightening, even filled with good air and with the drive off. I knew what monstrous energies were generated here. The feel of those energies was somehow still present, lingering on like an odd taste in my mouth.

I thought for a moment that the others were right there, in the first aft compartment that I came to. Then there was a moment of horror, when the four shapes I had seen in the dim light turned into four headless, legless corpses. The working men had taken their jackets off, and the blue clothing hung suspended in the middle of the compartment. Something (I learned later that it was static electricity) had made the chest and sleeves billow out full, as though there were torsos and arms inside them.

I took a deep breath, told myself that I was an idiot, and moved on to the main drive compartment.

Of course, the work of dismantling and inspecting the suspect drive unit had not waited for me. The housing had been swung free, and Uncle Duncan and Danny Shaker, together with two general crewmen, Joseph Munroe and Robert Doonan, were inside it, peering along the huge conical channel. Their legs all stuck out in different directions. I shivered again, because if the drive went on their heads would be vaporized in a microsecond. But it didn’t seem to worry them in the least.

“I’ll bet it’s that.” Uncle Duncan’s voice sounded strange, echoing off the hard vault of the drive chamber. “Is it easy to take apart?”

“No problem.” That was Danny Shaker. “Once I can get my hands on the right tools.”

An arm came groping in the air, toward a length of rough cloth in which wrenches were secured every few inches.

“I’m here,” I said. “I can get it for you. Which one do you want?”

“Give me the whole thing. We may have to try a few.” Danny Shaker’s right hand was still groping about behind him. I reached out to give him the set of wrenches, and saw that his shirt sleeve had somehow been snagged on the edge of the drive opening.

The sleeve was pulled up, to reveal his bare upper arm. I saw, with a horror that made anything earlier seem like nothing, the vivid red line of a scar across his biceps, midway between elbow and shoulder. As I placed the tools in his hand I moved my head to get a view of the underside of his arm. How far did the scar extend?

All the way—all the way around his arm!

I was in the drive chamber for another two hours, while Duncan and the crew made their repairs to the drive. I have to take Duncan’s word to Doctor Eileen that that’s what they were doing, because I took no notice of their actions. My mind was far away, back in the front room of the house with Paddy Enderton, while he raved about Dan, the armless half of the two-half-man. The bad one, the one much worse than brother Stan.

When they were all done with their work on the drive and came back to put their jackets on, Danny Shaker laid a friendly arm around my shoulders. “Hats off to Duncan West, Jay,” he said. And then, to Duncan, “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

I’m sure I cringed at his touch, but Shaker didn’t notice, because at that moment Joseph Munroe gave a snort of disapproval and disagreement.

Shaker turned to him. “Don’t give me that,Joe. I’ve been asking about that drive segment for the past two trips, and you’ve never had the ghost of an idea how to fix it.”

His voice was mild, but Munroe went completely still. “You’re right, Chief,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”

He added nothing more, but I suspected that at least one crew member didn’t approve of Uncle Duncan’s temporary addition to their number. As for me, I didn’t want to listen to praise of Duncan, or discussion of the balancing problem and Duncan’s fix-it solution, or anything else. All I wanted was to get back to Doctor Eileen.

“You remember what I asked you,” I said, as soon as I had a chance to get her alone. “About growing back a man’s arms if he lost them?”

“I told you. It’s impossible. If we still had the limbs, we could re-attach them, but that’s all.”

“I know. But suppose you had someone else’s arms. Could you attach them?”

“We could try. But it would be quite pointless. The muscles wouldn’t match, the nerves wouldn’t match, the bone sizes would be wrong. Worse than that, though, there would be tissue rejection.”

“What’s that?”

“Your body has a set of biological defenses built into it, what’s called your immune system. If something comes in from outside, bacteria, or foreign tissue, your body’s immune system develops a reaction to that. It does its level best to destroy it, to swallow it up and get rid of it. That includes rejection of tissue or organs from somebody else. We can control the rejection with drugs, but it’s very tricky. It only works if the donor—the person the tissue comes from—is very similar to the person receiving it. Even then, you usually get problems.”

“What do you mean, very similar? The same age, or the same size?”

“Jay, what is all this? Age and size don’t have much to do with it. It’s much more important to be genetically similar—a mother, or a father, as the tissue donor.”

“Or a brother?”

“Sure, a brother would be good. Best of all, of course, would be an identical twin. Then there’s absolutely no chance of tissue rejection, because genetically speaking the two are identical. Jay, what is the point of this?”

I told her then, the whole thing. “And I thought,” I said at last, “that maybe Danny Shaker killed his twin brother, so that he could steal Stan’s arms and have them attached to his own body, to replace the ones that he lost.”

Even as I was saying it, it sounded ridiculous. Doctor Eileen just stared at me.

“Did you see scars on both arms?”

“No. Just one.”

“Well, did Paddy Enderton tell you that Dan and Stan, the people he was afraid of, were identical twins?” “No. He said brothers. But—”

I realized, at that precise moment, how final death is. I had been about to say, we can ask him and find out. But Paddy Enderton had gone where he could never answer another question from anyone, about anything.

“Look, Jay.” Doctor Eileen was doing her best to take me seriously, but I didn’t think she was succeeding. “If you’re worried about this, there’s one very simple way to get an answer. I’ll ask Captain Shaker about the scar that you saw on his arm. Would you like me to do that?”

I didn’t. Part of the reason was that I hated Doctor Eileen to think I was that much of a fool, but I suspect that as big a reason was that I didn’t want Danny Shaker to think the same thing. In spite of the goosebumps that had run over my body in triple-deep layers when I first saw that red scar, I still could not relate the Danny Shaker that I knew, the man who treated me more like an equal and an adult than anyone I had ever known, to the faceless bogeyman who had haunted Paddy Enderton’s last days.

“No, it’s all right,” I said. “Don’t say anything to Captain Shaker. It was just that Paddy Enderton seemed so scared.”

I was cheating, passing off my own fears as belonging to somebody else. But it satisfied Doctor Eileen.

“Enderton was a dying man,” she said, “probably with a lot on his conscience, and plenty to be scared about if he were at all religious. But I’m quite willing to forget all about this, if you are.”

“I am.”

“So we’ll drop it. Tell me what Uncle Duncan did to repair the drive. You know, at this rate I ought to be charging Captain Shaker for Duncan’s presence on board, instead of paying his fare.”

I would have told her readily—if I had known. But all the time I had been in the drive chamber I had been far too jittery about Danny Shaker’s arm to notice what was being done to the drive itself.

I suspect that I was a big disappointment to Doctor Eileen. I could read her thoughts. She had brought me so far, and had hoped that I might be useful. But ever since I boarded the Cuchulain, I seemed unable to remember the simplest things.

What would she tell my mother when we got back?

After the work on the drive, the flight of the Cuchulain felt smoother. Whether this was real or imagined, I don’t know. But as the days and weeks wore on, and began to seem more and more the same, everyone on board settled into a mood that was both timeless and impatient.

The final stage was the most tantalizing of all. We reached the edge of the Maze, and we knew that at normal rates of deep-space progress we could have been at our target world in a few hours. But at Captain Shaker’s insistence, and with Doctor Eileen’s concurrence, we went creeping along the outer edge of the Maze like a mud-eel along the bottom of Lake Sheelin.

As we moved I saw, through a telescope, a dozen little worlds of whose existence I had first learned through Paddy Enderton’s little computer.

Clareen, Oola, Drumkeerin, Ardscull, Timolin, Culdaff, Tyrella, Moira… Now, instead of being rusty or flaming-red points in a hand-held display that could be extinguished by a poking finger, they were new and whiter points of light. But in a way they were hardly more real or tangible.

Somewhere, a day or two ahead, lay our true goal: Paddy’s Fortune. Was I excited? I certainly was—but no more so, I suspect, than the doctor, or than Jim Swift and Walter Hamilton.

The oddest thing was the crew of the Cuchulain. Danny Shaker had as good as told us that his crew didn’t give a hoot for the Godspeed Drive, or the possibility that we might be heading for Godspeed Base. But something was certainly winding them up. I came across Patrick O’Rourke and Tom Toole, heads together, talking confidentially in one of the corridors. They shut up at once when they saw me, but there was no hiding the gleam of excitement on their faces. And not just O’Rourke and Toole. Every hour, it seemed, I came across little knots of crewmen, taking time off their duties to talk together in low voices. Once I even thought I heard the whispered phrase, “Paddy’s Fortune.” But that seemed impossible. Doctor Eileen had never used those words on board the Cuchulain to describe where we were going. I knew that I never had, either.

The only exceptions to the excitement and expectation that filled the whole ship were Danny Shaker and Duncan West. Shaker was as calm, organized, and pleasant to me as ever. It was impossible not to respond to him, and I felt those strange suspicions of mine fading.

As for Duncan, he had been hidden behind his bland, pleasant face for as long as I had known him—which was all my life. He continued to work on ship repair and maintenance, where according to all the crew (except for sullen Joe Munroe) he had been performing miracles. Duncan didn’t seem to care when, if ever, we reached Paddy’s Fortune. He derived his pleasures from immediate results, knowing that another ingenious fix had worked.

Finally, there was no more time for speculation. The word came to Doctor Eileen—I don’t know who told her—that a body had been sighted at the exact location that our coordinate set predicted. It was only a minor worldlet, according to the telescope data, no more than a couple of kilometers across. But it was there, right where it should be.

Of course, we knew no details of the surface or internal composition. But that didn’t matter, because in just a couple more hours the Cuchulain would be parked in a neighboring orbit, close enough for a very good look, and after that a visit.

The plan that we would follow on arrival had been laid out long ago, by Doctor Eileen. Danny Shaker and all his crew would remain on board the Cuchulain. So, to my huge frustration and chagrin, would I. Doctor Eileen told me that she had promised my mother that I would be exposed as little as possible to any unknown dangers, and landing on a new worldlet could certainly provide those.

So Duncan West, Jim Swift, Walter Hamilton, and the doctor herself would take a little humpbacked cargo vessel and fly across to Paddy’s Fortune. Based on that initial exploration, they would either return to the Cuchulain, or send the signal for others to join them. The third possibility, thought of I am sure but never discussed in my presence, was that they would neither return, nor send us a signal. If that happened, I believe that the next decision would have been left with Danny Shaker.

Rather than going along to the cargo area and watching the cargo beetle be launched, I chose to stay in an observation chamber in the living quarters and stare at Paddy’s Fortune through the best image magnification device that I could find.

We were maybe fifty kilometers away from the surface of the little worldlet, a distance that Doctor Eileen, or more likely Danny Shaker, must have judged sufficient to keep us clear of danger. It was still close enough to let me see the details of the surface—such as they were. But what I stared at on the image screen was absolutely baffling, and here’s why.

On the way out from Erin, three or four sessions with Danny Shaker had taught me a lot about the Forty Worlds, and also a good deal about the Maze. I knew that a little worldlet, like the one that I was staring at, could have many things—rocks, light metals, salts, and water. Even carbon dioxide, ammonia, and methane. But those gases would have to be frozen, or trapped in the interior. Because the one thing above all others that no world as small as Paddy’s Fortune could have was an atmosphere. The gravity field was simply too tiny to hold on to gases.

However, the surface details of the world on the screen were, without a doubt, softened and blurred by something between them and the Cuchulain. And when I stared hard at the limb, where the surface of Paddy’s Fortune showed a half-moon horizon, I could see a thin blurry ring where light from Maveen was scattered back toward the imager on the Cuchulain.

That was the way that the rim of Erin itself had looked from a distance, as sunlight scattered from the layer of air.

Except that Paddy’s Fortune couldn’t have air.

It was too much for me to stand. I left the observation chamber and hurried along to the main control room of the ship. Danny Shaker was there with Tom Toole. They were watching a different viewing screen, one that showed the cargo beetle drifting smoothly away from the column of the collapsed cargo hold, and out into free space.

“Now then, Jay,” said Shaker, “I’m surprised that you aren’t down there to see them off.”

“I was watching—the little world.” (I had almost said Paddy’s Fortune.) “I knew that Doctor Eileen and the others would be flying down to it, so I thought I’d follow their approach. But I can’t understand the way that it looks.”

“Join the club,” Tom Toole said, and he laughed.

“We had the same problem,” Shaker said, “when we made our first observations. You mean the blurred surface?”

“And the way the horizon looks. You told me that a little worldlet—”

“I did. And I still say it.” Shaker turned to the control board, and an image of Paddy’s Fortune sprang up there. “It can’t hold an atmosphere, right? So how can it possibly look like that? I’ll tell you how. There’s a complete translucent shell, extending over the whole world and about a hundred meters above the surface. Artificial, of course, and suspended we don’t know how. Somebody didn’t want the bare surface exposed to space.

“But that’s not the half of it. Come on, Jay, let’s test how good you are at guessing. What’s under that see-through cover?”

“An atmosphere.” It was the obvious answer.

“Too easy, eh? All right, what else?”

What else? Here was a whole worldlet that somebody had gone to the enormous trouble of covering with a layer through which gas could not escape, just so Paddy’s Fortune could have an atmosphere. Why would anyone want to give such a small world an atmosphere? Who or what needs an atmosphere?

“Life! There’s living things, down there under the cover.”

Shaker turned triumphantly to Toole. “Now didn’t I tell you, Tom, that he’d figure it out?”

“But how can you possibly know that there is life?” I said. I had peered at the surface with the best imager on board, and seen no plants or animals.

“I could ask you for one more guess, but it wouldn’t be fair, because there’s instruments on the Cuchulain that you don’t know about yet.” Shaker touched another couple of keys on the control board, and a small inset appeared on the screen. It was a jagged line, rising and falling above a horizontal axis. “That’s what we get when we look at the surface of the world out there with a thing called a spectrometer. It measures how much light comes back to us at a whole set of different wavelengths. Well, we know exactly what’s going in—that’s just the light from Maveen itself. So when we put those two pieces of information together, we can often tell what material we’re looking at. What we find here, and over a lot of the worldlet’s surface, is something called a chlorophyll signature, a curve that tells us for sure that there are plants down there. Chlorophyll means plants.”

“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.