Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 17

I never did like Walter Hamilton. I suppose it all goes back to what Danny Shaker told me: You are defined not so much by what you are, as by the way that you are treated by other people.

Doctor Eileen might occasionally pat me on the head or ruffle my hair, but she did it sort of absentmindedly, without thinking. And although I hated it, in a way she had the right to do it because she had been around me ever since I was born.

Walter Hamilton was different. He hardly knew me, but he acted as though I was a nothing. He didn’t talk to me, he talked through me.

I would ask him a simple question (though not often after the first few days); something like, “Dr. Hamilton, you said that Erin’s contact with other stars was cut off right at the time of Isolation. But Dr. Swift said you don’t need a Godspeed Drive to transmit radio signals. Why didn’t people send those from star to star?”

And he would suck in his pimply cheeks, and sniff, and stare at nothing. Then he’d come out with something like, “Let us not be quite so crushingly naive. An interstellar subluminal communications network may well have preceded the existence of the superluminal Godspeed Drive. However, once the latter had been fully established, the obsolescence of the former was guaranteed. And of course, following the cataclysm of Isolation the presumed problems of basic civilization survival totally inhibited subluminal communications redevelopment.”

And I would think (but not say), Ugh!

Yet both Jim Swift and Doctor Eileen had told me that Walter Hamilton was a serious and competent research worker, someone who really cared about his subject. I didn’t argue. So far as I was concerned she could have my share of him. For most of the trip out to the Maze I had done my best to avoid the man.

But now, on Paddy’s Fortune, he was the closest thing to a friend that I had. I must say, the competition was not great: Danny Shaker, who said he was my friend, and O’Rourke, Doonan, Munroe, and Wilgus, who made it perfectly clear that they were no such thing.

We all stood in silence, watching the cargo beetle lift off. Danny Shaker waited until it had eased its way beyond the atmospheric shield and was out of sight, then he turned to Patrick O’Rourke.

“Well, you asked for it, boyo, and now you’ve got it. You can go anywhere, poke into anything you find.”

The four crewmen laughed, and O’Rourke said, “You can sure count on that, Chief—if I can find anything to poke into.”

Shaker nodded. “Go ahead, then. I’ve got other things to do. I’ll be at the cargo beetle if you need me. I expect your report in four or five hours.”

Without another word he turned and headed into the tall plants, moving along a faint line of disturbance that showed the way to the cargo beetle that we had arrived in. The vegetation sprang into position as soon as he had pushed through. I was starting right after him when Sean Wilgus moved to block my path.

“Not you,” he said softly. “You stay with us.” He lifted a hand to his belt.

“Now then. First things first.” Patrick O’Rourke stepped in front of Wilgus. “You’re too hasty, Sean, as usual. Don’t forget what we came for.” He turned toward Walter Hamilton. “You there. You’ve been here for a while. Are there any breaks in all this mess of plants?”

Not “Dr. Hamilton,” you see, but “You there.” Danny Shaker wouldn’t have allowed such rudeness, only he wasn’t around to stop it.

Hamilton glared at O’Rourke, but he answered quickly enough, and in a tone not designed to please. “If you’d bothered to use the eyes in your head on the way down, you’d know there are no totally cleared areas. But there are certain regions, like the one where we are presently standing, at which the natural climax species attain a reduced height. They seem to be associated with deep, narrow fissures in the surface. We found a dozen or more of those, up to ten meters deep and with more vegetation at the bottom of them. And then there are the trails.”

“Aha!” That was Sean Wilgus. He came around to face O’Rourke. “I told you they’d been holding out on us. Trails! For people!” He swung to face Hamilton. “Right?”

The scientist stared down his nose at him, if you can do that to somebody taller than you are. “Don’t sound like a bigger fool than you are. There are no people on this world. The trails are made by the frequent passage of small animals.”

“How do you know?”

“There couldn’t be people here. This world isn’t big enough to support them.”

“Just like it couldn’t possibly have an atmosphere, according to all you big experts. But it has one.” Wilgus was stepping closer to Hamilton. Patrick O’Rourke pushed in between them.

“Either there are or there aren’t,” he growled. “People, I mean. I told you, Sean Wilgus, calm down. That’s what we’re here for, to stay cool and see for ourselves. Make one of your wild moves, and the chief will skin you when we get back to him—aye, and me, too, for letting you do it. This isn’t a big planetoid. Let’s get down to finding our own answers.”

O’Rourke was so big and broad that Walter Hamilton and Sean Wilgus could hardly see each other around him. For the moment it put an end to their argument. The four crewmen from the Cuchulain ignored Hamilton and me and started to organize their own search effort.

What they decided was simple-minded, but it ought to work. They would line up thirty or so paces apart, close enough to be in easy earshot, and walk around Paddy’s Fortune in the direction of the setting sun. A “day” on the planetoid was a couple of hours, but on the other hand its circumference was only five or six kilometers. The walkers would catch up with the sun. By the time they had walked until Maveen was twice overhead, they would have performed more than one full circuit of the world. At that point they would either have found something interesting, or they would have found nothing. They could perform another sweep, farther north or south, or they might try something completely different.

No one suggested a role for me or Walter Hamilton. We trailed along after them, the two of us walking one behind the other in the path of flattened vegetation left by Sean Wilgus. I was in front, and I gradually slowed our pace so that we lagged farther and farther behind the crewman. I wanted to tell Walter Hamilton what Doctor Eileen had refused to hear: the full details of everything that I had heard when I was hidden on the Cuchulain.

I ought to have known better. If Doctor Eileen, who knew me so well, found it impossible to believe me, what chance did I have with a near-stranger?

I talked for maybe five minutes. Finally Hamilton caught up with me and pushed past, saying as he went, “Would you for God’s sake shut up! It’s hard enough to think without your blathering. And I’ve got plenty to think about.”

He hadn’t even been listening! But then he started, about the observed ecology of the planetoid, and how it all had to balance, and how anybody with half a brain and a first course in population dynamics would realize that the biggest animal you could find on Paddy’s Fortune would mass no more than a mouse, or at absolute maximum a small miniver, and Sean Wilgus and anyone else who talked of people on this worldlet had to be morons.

Then all of a sudden he stopped dead, and said, “For the love of Kevin! A natural world’s balance. But of course it can’t possess any such thing.” He went down to one knee on the muddy ground, and pulled a little calculator and an electronic book from his pocket.

“What is it?” I said. “What have you found?”

“I told you, shut up,” he muttered. “I’ve got to think.” He ignored me as he did a whole bunch of calculations, then started to key new entries into his book.

I wanted to tell him that nobody could tell me to shut up, and I had plenty to think about, too. But I didn’t want to make him angrier than he already seemed to be. Although he wasn’t my choice of company, whatever he did he wouldn’t kill me. I couldn’t say that of any of the others. And Hamilton had a gun at his belt, a white-handled pistol that he could use if anyone tried violence.

Meanwhile he was back on his feet again, and moving fast. We were closing on the line of four crewmen. I knew that was the case, because although we were again in the middle of tall, scrubby bushes and I couldn’t see anything but leaves and twigs and soggy black earth—how did it stay so damp, without rain?—I heard voices ahead.

Angry voices. Everyone was cursing. The crew had arrived on Paddy’s Fortune looking for women, but what they had found so far was mostly mud. They had stopped for a rest, calling to each other to compare loud and angry notes.

Walter Hamilton went up to Sean Wilgus and waved the electronic book in his face. “Listen to me,” he said.

Wilgus had his right thumb in his mouth. He was squatting down, peering along a low archway that ran through the tight-leaved plants, and he took no notice of Hamilton.

With loud complaints coming in from all sides, that was not too surprising. The only person who wasn’t shouting was Robert Doonan, and that was probably because he was in such bad physical shape that he needed all his energy just to walk and breathe. But Patrick O’Rourke, off to the left, had encountered a patch of thornbush, with spines hard and sharp enough to draw blood. Joseph Munroe, next in the line, had not been looking where he set his feet. He had stepped into one of the little pools. It turned out that it was not so much a pool as a deep pothole, only a few feet across but as deep as it was wide, and Munroe had plunged into cold water up to his crotch.

Sean Wilgus himself had just crossed a little trail and seen a brown thing like a small kangaroo rat jumping along it. He had tried to grab it as it passed, but it had bitten him on the thumb and got away.

If he had been in a bad mood before the search began, he was in a worse one now. He had taken his gun from his belt, and he was aiming it along the dark tunnel.

Walter Hamilton stopped waving his book and crouched down at Wilgus’s side. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

Wilgus did not even look up. “I’m waiting. Next time I see some damned jumping thing, I shoot. I’ll teach that son of a bitch.”

“You will not! This is an unexplored world, a whole new balance of nature. You are doing too much damage already, smashing a way through the plants.”

I admired Walter Hamilton’s courage in taking on Sean Wilgus, even if the balance of nature on Paddy’s Fortune didn’t seem like a big deal to me. But I don’t know if Wilgus was even listening. He certainly took no notice. As we watched he crouched lower, sighted along his gun, and fired twice. There was a high-pitched sound, somewhere between a bark and a scream of pain, from farther along the tunnel.

“Got it!” Wilgus shouted.

Walter Hamilton produced his own high-pitched sound, a cry of outrage and disbelief. He reached down with one hand, grabbed the shoulder of Sean Wilgus, and lifted. In the low gravity of Paddy’s Fortune, Wilgus came easily up into the air, still in his crouched position.

“You will stop that!” Hamilton was stammering in his fury. “There will be no more killing of native life. Do you hear me? None! Or I will—I will report you to Erin’s central council.”

If Hamilton had left his threat at that, Sean Wilgus might have been too busy laughing to do anything else. Threatening a spacer with a pack of Erin bureaucrats was no way to command respect.

But Walter Hamilton did something much more provoking. He released his hold on Sean Wilgus’s shoulder, and reached for the white-handled gun at his own belt.

He wanted to threaten, that was all. I feel sure he wouldn’t have fired—I bet Walter Hamilton had never fired anything in the whole of his life. But I saw the look on the face of Sean Wilgus as Hamilton’s hand closed around the pistol butt. It was a moment of surprise, followed by an expression of anger and pure, vicious hatred. And his own weapon began to lift.

“Dr. Hamilton!” I cried. “Let go of it.”

I was too late. Wilgus aimed his own weapon and fired three times, so quickly it all sounded like one shot. Walter Hamilton, his hand still on his gun, fell backward into the bushes.

For a moment Sean Wilgus and I both stared at Hamilton’s body, as blood spouted from great wounds in its chest and neck. Then we turned to look at each other.

I could hear Wilgus’s panting breath. I fancied that I could hear his mind working, too. He was in deep trouble. He could tell Danny Shaker that the murder was self-defense from Walter Hamilton’s armed attack, and the pistol in the other man’s hand would support his statement.

But not with Jay Hara as a witness to the whole thing.

Wilgus’s gun started to lift again—toward me. I cried out in fear, and threw myself sideways into the bushes. The gun fired again before I had gone half a dozen steps. But already the dense vegetation hid me from view. I heard a strange hissing, as bullets swept through tough leaves, but I was left untouched. I ran blindly on—and almost went smack into the grasp of Joe Munroe.

Like all the crewmen, he must have been heading for Sean Wilgus to find out what was happening. I couldn’t expect any help from him. He had been a big supporter of the idea of throwing me into space without a suit. I ducked, wriggled away from his grabbing hand, and plunged deeper into the jungle of plants.

The first two minutes were pure panic, when all I wanted was to put distance between me and the crewmen. After that came more rational worry. I could run, but I couldn’t hide. Every step that I took left its mark, in the form of flattened or broken plants. The others were a lot slower than me, but all they had to do was follow. They had plenty of time, and they outnumbered me. They could work as a team, following me one after another until I was forced to stop for rest and sleep.

I moved as gently as possible, trying to repair damage by lifting twigs and blades back into position after I passed through. It didn’t work. There were still signs, and it would surely be days before they faded. Even if the plants did not show where I had been, I was leaving footsteps in the soft earth.

I crouched down, head bowed and ready to cry. Paddy’s Fortune had seemed like a big enough place when I was walking around it with Walter Hamilton. Now it had become tiny, offering no possible hiding place.

The shadow of my own head on the floor in front of me finally told me what I had to do. As I sat despairing, it had crept slowly across the ground. The world was rotating, and Maveen moved across the sky. In another half hour it would be dark. Tracking me through the plants would be impossible. But less than an hour after that, the sun would rise again. I would again be in danger.

Unless…

I stood up, took my bearings, and started north. That was a move with its own dangers, because it took me back toward Walter Hamilton and possibly to my pursuers.

I stared in all directions at every step and crept along as quietly as possible. The only time that I stopped was to lean down and drink from one of the deep little ponds. The water tasted fine, cool and clear as Lake Sheelin. I would have drunk anyway, even if it had been warm and muddy. I was parched.

I was also absolutely starving. How long since my last meal? Only eight hours or so, but it felt like days.

I crept on. There was a terrible moment when I heard a nearby shout that sounded like Joe Munroe, and an answering call from the other side. It sent chills through me, and I froze. But there was no safety in that. I started moving again, through growing twilight. I was following my own tracks but I could hardly see them. Then came another awful moment, when I almost tripped over the body of Walter Hamilton.

He was dead and lying face-up, eyes open and staring. I huddled down at his side. I could hardly bear to touch him, but I had to. I wanted his gun.

It was gone. Either he had dropped it, or one of the others had already taken it. I groped around on the floor in increasing gloom, until my fingers located something hard. Not the gun. The electronic notebook that he had been holding. I took that and put it in my own pocket, along with Paddy Enderton’s tiny computer and display unit. I felt again for the gun, all around the body. Maybe it was there, somewhere among the flattened plants, but I could not find it.

At last I gave up the search. I moved on, always north. Half an hour later I was easing forward into noiseless twilight.

If I had my directions right, in front of me lay not the short-lived darkness of nighttime on Paddy’s Fortune; I was approaching the months-long night of the region around the worldlet’s north pole.

Ten minutes more, and I could barely see where I was going. I sank to the ground and stretched out on soft, damp earth. For the first time in hours, I was free to relax. If I could not see where I was, no one else would be able to track me here without hand-held lights. Even then it would be difficult.

I said I was free to relax, but of course I couldn’t. I was too wired up. There’s a big difference between seeing a dead man, like Paddy Enderton, and seeing a man die. The image of Walter Hamilton’s throat and chest kept coming into my mind, the bright blood gouting out. I had never realized before that blood could run like water. I hadn’t liked Hamilton much. Now I felt guilty about that.

The ground beneath me was unnaturally warm, but I was shivering. I told myself, over and over, that I was safe, except that a part of my mind kept asking if that word included a situation where a person was without food, drink, light, or shelter, and had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.

What actually happened next was ridiculous. Although I would have sworn that it could never happen, I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, it was raining. That was impossible. How could a tiny world like Paddy’s Fortune support a layer of cloud? But certainly those were cool raindrops falling on my face.

I realized then what ought to have been obvious from the time I first set eyes on that artificial shell around Paddy’s Fortune. If the planetoid could have an atmosphere, it could have anything. It was not a natural world. Something controlled conditions on the surface, and a shower of rain was probably no more difficult to arrange than breathable air.

My next thought was that the rain itself had awakened me. Then a bright light shone in my eyes, only a few feet off to one side, and I heard the rustling of leaves in the darkness.

I did not wait to see who it was. In one movement I was on my feet, running doubled-over through the clutching plant life. It was a dangerous thing to do, because I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face. If a wall of rock had been in my path I would have run headlong into it.

It wasn’t quite that bad, but what happened next was even more unnerving. The ground vanished from beneath my feet and left me running in midair. I had encountered one of the deep fissures that Walter Hamilton had talked about. In the low gravity of Paddy’s Fortune, the long fall down the crack in the surface should have been more frightening than dangerous. Actually it was both. While I was still falling and moving rapidly forward, my hands hit a hard surface in front of me, skinning my knuckles. My body turned and dropped. In three more seconds I landed, rolling over on one hip and elbow.

Every bit of breath was knocked out of me. I lay flat on my back, struggling to bring air into my lungs and staring straight up at a light that was steadily approaching.

Sean Wilgus? Patrick O’Rourke? Or even Danny Shaker himself?

It made no difference. I couldn’t stand up and run to save my life.

The white light brightened, moved down to within a foot of my face, then lifted higher. It was being held in someone’s hand. As the arm was raised I had a first look at the person himself.

It was not Sean Wilgus, or anyone else of the Cuchulain’s crew. Nor was it Doctor Eileen, or a member of our party. It was a stranger, a thin, short-haired boy maybe two years younger than me, with ragged pants and jacket of light grey and a face and limbs smudged all over with mud and earth. He was holding a little backpack made of brown leather in one hand, and a bizarre-looking pink ring that threw off a bright beam from its center in the other.

Sean Wilgus had been right. The learned Walter Hamilton, with all his degrees, had been wrong.

There were people on Paddy’s Fortune.