Godspeed (novel)

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?”

“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.”

“That’s more than odd. It’s crazy.”

“I know. But somehow the word’s been going around the ship that this little worldlet has women on it. Living, human women. Young women.”

“Then that rules me out. Your crew certainly entertains some bizarre ideas, Captain.”

“They do. But that won’t change just because you or I wish it. So this is the favor I’m asking: Will you let some of my crew roam around here for a day or so? Then they’ll find nothing, and go back and tell their mates that they saw for themselves and there’s nothing hidden. After that, you and your professors can go on exploring for as long as you like.”

“Which won’t be for more than another hour, the way things have been going. This is an artificial world, no doubt of it, but we’ve found nothing. Nothing to suggest that it was ever a Godspeed Base, I mean, and nothing to hint that it ever had anything to do with one.” Doctor Eileen snorted. “You know, if you hadn’t come down I was thinking of going back to the Cuchulain anyway, sitting down, and going over everything that’s happened one more time to try to make sense of it.”

“Perfect. Do it. The crew would like that, too, knowing you weren’t trying to steer them away from anything.”

“Wait a minute, though. Walter Hamilton says he wants to stay even if the rest of us go back. This place seems to have nothing to do with a Godspeed Base, but it does date back to before the Isolation, and it has its own unique biology. Hamilton wants to study it.”

“Tell him to study away, Doctor, and welcome to it. So long as he doesn’t try to advise my men where to go and not to go. I’ll tell the crew to let him wander where he likes.”

“And I’ll tell Jim Swift and Duncan to get ready. They’re back at the other cargo beetle.”

She pointed up across the thicket of plants. She was too short to see over them.

“What about me!” I said.

“You can come with—” But Doctor Eileen paused and raised her eyebrows at Danny Shaker.

“Not a good idea.” He was shaking his head. “Without me on the Cuchulain—or even with me… why, that’s the whole reason I brought him. Jay should stay here. But don’t worry, Doctor. The men here are the pick of the bunch. He’ll be safe with us. I pledge my life on it.”

I wanted to shout, but what about my life? I didn’t, though. It would have been pointless. Doctor Eileen was convinced that I had been acting like a moron on the Cuchulain, and she thought that Dan Shaker was just worried about my safety.

As she started back along a trail of flattened plants, I hurried along after her. I just had to talk to her some more. But as we went I had another thought.

Suppose she believed every word that I said. Even though Danny Shaker carried no weapon himself, his men all had them. He had told me that Doctor Eileen’s group had guns and knives, too, but I saw no sign of one on her. If Danny Shaker wanted to, he could just order his men (the “pick of the bunch”!—who’d pick Sean Wilgus or Joe Munroe for anything but dirty work?) to kill me, and kill Doctor Eileen, and kill all the rest of our party.

That’s the sort of gloomy thought you have when you’re struggling along head-down through tall leafy plants that catch you as you go, and you know that just behind you there are men who have already said they’d be more than pleased to chuck you out of an airlock into naked space.

I’ll take those thoughts though, anytime, over the ones that I had ten minutes later; I’m talking about the ones that came as I stood at Walter Hamilton’s side with Danny Shaker and his men just behind me, and watched the cargo beetle rise up, ease its way toward the softly glowing shield that surrounded Paddy’s Fortune, and quietly disappear. Doctor Eileen, Jim Swift, and Uncle Duncan were all on board. I had tried one more time to talk to her, and she wouldn’t even listen.

As the ship vanished beyond the translucent shield, my thoughts lurched from uneasiness to cold terror. Even now, I don’t like to recall them.