Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 25

“Life in space,” Tom Toole said cheerfully, “is like life in war. You go muddling along for ages with nothing much happening, and you’re bored as all get out; then something happens, and all of a sudden you’re so busy you don’t know which way to turn.”

I was scraping a grease-coated wall of the cargo hold, in a place where cleaning machines, despite Duncan West’s best fix-it efforts, refused to go. I grunted, and went on scraping. It was a rare philosophical statement from Tom, made as he watched me labor. I knew nothing about war, and hoped I never would, but the two weeks that followed Joe Munroe’s death had taught me that Tom was wrong about space. I wasn’t bored, even though we were crawling slower than ever toward our new destination. I didn’t have time to be. I was kept busy from the moment I got up to the time I collapsed into my bunk. Between them, Tom Toole and Pat O’Rourke never gave me a moment’s peace—particularly since every job took me three times as long as they said it ought to. It had to be intentional on their part. Thinks he’s a spacer now, does he? Well, we’ll show him. He still has a lot to learn.

I could have complained to Danny Shaker. I felt like doing it a dozen times, but I didn’t. I just gritted my teeth, swore under my breath, and stuck at it while the rest of the crew took it easy.

There was a bonus side to all my labors. I was learning about the workings of the Cuchulain in a way that no talking or lessons could ever have given me. But I didn’t realize how fast my hard work was making time fly by, until I heard an odd, fluting whistle over the communications system.

Tom said at once, “All hands call. Drop that. We have to get to the bridge.”

He set off at once and without waiting for me. I, full of worries of onboard disaster, hurried after him to the main control room.

“Can’t tell what it is.” Danny Shaker was at the controls when we entered, juggling displays. “It’s strange, I show a target when I use ultralong radio waves, but nothing on visible or infra-red, or on regular radar.”

“What are you going to do?” Pat O’Rourke asked. All the crew were crowding around.

“Keep flying and wait for a better signal. We’re still at extreme range, but we’re closing fast.” Shaker saw that I had joined the huddle. “Score one for the navaid, Jay. I don’t know if that’s the Net and the hardware reservoir we’re looking for, but something is just ahead with the orbital elements and motion you specified. Go get Eileen Xavier. We’ll be arriving in an hour or two. She’ll want to take a peek at this.”

Arriving. At Godspeed Base?

I hurried away, wondering again about Danny Shaker. He had been careful to keep me away from Doctor Eileen and the rest of the Erin party, so I had no idea how they were doing. But now, with the crew certain to stay around the control room for a while, he was in effect inviting me to go along and tell Doctor Eileen and the others anything that I liked.

Why? I didn’t know. I understood the ship’s workings a lot better after all my work, but I sure didn’t understand Dan Shaker. As Tom Toole had said, he was a deep one. I could now dismiss all the “two-half-man” stuff that had given me nightmares before, but I couldn’t get rid of the thought that Shaker might be testing me in some way that I couldn’t guess.

It was this feeling, more than any shred of fact, that made me cautious. I intended to do just what Shaker had directed: Find Doctor Eileen, and bring her back to the control room. And if we talked on the way? Well, that wasn’t ruled out in his instructions.

I intended to do that. What I hadn’t allowed for was the possibility that I would run into Mel Fury the moment I entered Doctor Eileen’s quarters.

She must have been hiding away and somehow watching the corridor, because she popped out in front of me as soon as I came through the door.

“Hi,Jay!”

“Hey!”

We stood staring at each other in pleasure—and something else, too, at least in my case. Concern.

“Mel, for God’s sake—you’re supposed to try to look like a boy.”

With her fair hair growing and combed loose in a different style, she was far more female than she had ever been. She would have been accepted as a girl, even by the primped and pampered primadonnas of Erin.

Mel shook her head, and her lengthening hair floated around it. “I can’t, Jay. I mean, I can try to look boyish, but I can’t succeed. Doctor Eileen says that any man on board would know, even if I cut my hair again. She says the trick is not to let anybody see me.”

Which was exactly what I had been saying, from the moment she came on board the Cuchulain. I could tell from the way Mel said “Doctor Eileen” that she had been added to the list of Eileen Xavier worshippers, and Doctor Eileen’s word was sacred. Even so, the way Mel had jumped out at me didn’t suggest great caution. Suppose some crewman had come in right after me?

“Mel, I want you to carry Walter Hamilton’s gun around with you. Just as a precaution.”

She pulled a face. “I hate guns. I’ll think about it. Where is it?”

“Back in my quarters. I’ll give it to Doctor Eileen, and ask her to pass it on to you. Where is she?”

“Gone to get Jim—you know, Dr. Swift.”

I didn’t like that, either. Jim Swift used to be my buddy, but from the familiar way she dropped his name, he was now hers.

“I have to find the doctor,” I said. “At once. She and I are urgently needed in the main control room.”

It was designed to impress, but it didn’t work.

“Phooey,” Mel said. “If they want you urgently, it’s to make tea. What happened to your voice? You sound husky and creaky, like one of the crewmen.”

“My voice is fine. And I am a crewman.”

“Playing at being one is more like. Listen, Jay. I’ve been working on the navaid with Jim Swift—he’s really sharp—and we’re coming up with something that may be terrifically important. Remember the ‘Slowdrive’ that you tagged in Walter Hamilton’s notebook? Well, I cross-referenced it in the navaid—”

“You can tell me about that some other time. At the moment I’m busy. I must find Eileen Xavier, and I must take her with me to the main control room.”

And I swept grandly out, before Mel could say another word.

All right, so I was miffed, and what I did was stupid. But I couldn’t forgive her that crack about making tea, and not being a real crew member—maybe because I suspected it was true. So although I felt sorry that Mel and I hadn’t had a real chance to talk, I didn’t go back. Instead I found Doctor Eileen and headed for the ship’s bridge.

I really wanted to talk, to tell her what had been happening. The trouble was, she didn’t choose to listen. She wanted an audience of her own, so she could ramble on with her worries. If I had changed, Doctor Eileen had changed, too, in the few months since we lifted off from Muldoon Port. I had always thought of her as old, but old like something that has always been around and will be around forever. Now Doctor Eileen looked tired, peevish and depressed.

“The Net, eh?” She laughed, but it was a harsh, barking cough without any humor in it. “The great hardware reservoir. Well, maybe. I’ve talked enough to Mel to know that Paddy’s Fortune was set up as a self-sustaining biological reservoir. What comes next?”

“The Needle, The Eye, Godspeed Base—and a Godspeed Drive.”

“You think so? It’s great to be young. You know, Jay, I’ve thought a lot since we left Erin. About space, sure, but about Erin, too, and what we are. I used to think of the Isolation as some sort of pure accident, something that couldn’t have been prevented. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t think that humanity before the Isolation was just one big happy family. Maybe at one time, during the early, sublight colonization. But then I think that the people who developed the Godspeed Drive came to regard themselves as special, superior to planetary colonists and settlers. The Godspeed Drive was so powerful, it made them feel like gods themselves and they wanted to keep it that way. They left the colonies ignorant. And we’ve stayed ignorant. They placed their supply and maintenance facilities deep in space. No one on Erin knew how the drive worked. No one knew that Paddy’s Fortune even existed. No one would know it today, if Paddy Enderton had gone overboard that night on Lake Sheelin.”

“You think the people with the Godspeed Drive stopped coming to the Forty Worlds on purpose?”

“Oh, no. That wasn’t planned. I’m sure there was a monstrous accident, a catastrophe of some kind. But Erin wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today if the group who controlled the Drive hadn’t wanted to feel superior. It’s a story as old as history, from water control to drug prescription to access to space: The people with the treasure want to keep the keys of the treasure-house to themselves. What they never dream is that one day they might not be around to use them. So they don’t plan for that.”

Talking about the past, Doctor Eileen sounded like a defeated woman. Maybe Duncan West had it right: Live in the present. If you started to dwell on history, you would find a thousand ways to make yourself miserable.

We entered the control room, and what was revealed on the displays there was enough to halt Doctor Eileen’s brooding.

The big screen showed a shape like a round balloon made from fishing net. The individual loops of the net were triangular, and at many of the nodes I could see a “knot,” a little point of light. It was the Net. Was it also the hardware reservoir?

“Take a look, Doctor,” said Danny Shaker. He was busy at the console, but apparently had eyes in the back of his head. “No wonder our first look was just with low-frequency radio. All the radiation shorter than a few kilometers went right on through. But the long wavelengths were right to interact with the mesh and give a return signal.”

That was the first hint I had of the size of the Net ahead of us. If those tiny individual loops of the balloon were kilometers across, then each point of light at the nodes…

Doctor Eileen pointed to a smaller display mounted next to the big one. It showed a single node at high magnification, a silver point of light expanded to a grainy, lumpy half-sphere. That could be an empty cargo container, a manufacturing facility, even a ship. The surrounding gossamer threads that formed loops of the net were cables or tubes, tens of meters across, running from the partial sphere and anchoring it in space.

Soon I could see something else. The object on the screen was not complete. Jagged break lines ran across the blunt end. At the node floated no more than a shattered remnant, a broken fragment of a complete structure.

As I stared, the display flickered. It changed to show a pair of thick partial rings, battered rust-colored doughnuts intertwined and floating in space. Another flicker, and before I could see any detail on the doughnuts they too were gone. The image had changed to a loose cluster of small objects. Most of them had the familiar bowl-backed shape of a cargo beetle. They were loosely connected by cables almost too thin to see, and when I looked closely I could see individual differences. One lacked its lower half, another had been sheared in two across the center, the upper dome of a third had a great hole punched through it.

Another flicker. I was gazing at a rough partial sphere, like the first object we had seen but even more battered. It was less grainy in appearance. The Cuchulain was still approaching the space structure, and the high-resolution imagers were steadily improving the quality of the pictures.

“It’s a junk yard.” I spoke in a whisper to Doctor Eileen. She had lost her dejected look. “This can’t be the hardware reservoir.”

“We’ll see,” Danny Shaker said over his shoulder. “We’re making an inventory now. So many nodes, the first look has to be automatic.”

“So many nodes” was an understatement. I tried a quick count and gave up after half a minute. Hundreds, maybe thousands. This mess couldn’t be Godspeed Base. It would take a long time just to visit each node on the Net.

I was still staring when I felt a slap on the back—Tom Toole, grinning all over his face.

“Here we are, Jay,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re all going to be rich—rolling in money.”

“Rich? It’s all junk.” But as I spoke I realized that the atmosphere in the control room was like a celebration. Crew members were laughing, shaking hands, and hammering their fists on the walls.

“The hell it is!” Tom Toole, in his enthusiasm, reached his arm around his enemy Doctor Eileen and gave her a squeeze. “I’ve been making trips to the Forty Worlds for half my life, and I’ve never seen the like of this. Many a time, come Winterfall, the lads and me would go home with nothing to show. Not this time, though. Look at that!” He pointed to the display, where a twisted cylindrical hulk hung in its retaining network of tubes. “Even if it don’t work—even if it’s empty—it’s valuable materials. Every one of the things out there is money. Give me a scavenger ship, a decent crew, and half a year in this place, I’d go home Lord of Skibbereen.”

Doctor Eileen had become caught up in the mood. She was laughing at the antics of tubby Donald Rudden, bouncing up and down in place until his belly and jowls rippled.

Then I saw Danny Shaker. Ignoring the noise around him he sat at the controls, quietly and carefully making some fine adjustment. I followed his glance to another and smaller screen. At first I saw only a reduced version of the whole net. Then as I moved to stand by Shaker’s side I realized that he was performing a controlled zoom, arrowing the display toward a central region of the field.

That center was not empty. Delineated in space, unattached to any point of the network, a slender sharp-ended feature was appearing. I cannot say I saw it, because nothing was visible. I deduced its existence because something was occulting the background field of stars.

“The Needle,” Shaker said softly. I could not tell if he was talking to me or to himself. “First the Net and hardware reservoir.” He glanced across to the screen showing the results of the node scan, and from his expression he didn’t share the crew’s enthusiasm. Displayed at the moment was an object like a smaller version of the Cuchulain, except that something had snapped it across the column of the cargo hold and twisted the two halves until the flared drive unit sat next to the living quarters. “Reservoir, Net, and Needle. So where’s the Eye?”

“The Eye of the Needle,” I said. “In the center…”

Under Danny Shaker’s control, the imaging system was already creeping along the invisible line of the Needle, beginning at one imagined end and scanning steadily toward the other.

I strained my eyes, willing photons to appear and signal the existence of a Needle’s Eye. The display offered only a line of cold, starfree darkness from one end to the other.

Danny Shaker sighed, lifted his hands from the controls, and turned to me. For one second I saw tension on his face. Then he gave me a smile.

“Not so easy, eh? Needle, but no Eye. Here.” He stood up and gestured to the chair. “Try your hand, Jay. I need a bit of young man’s luck.”

I didn’t think I was particularly lucky, but nothing in the Forty Worlds could have kept me out of that control chair. Three minutes of experiment gave me the hang of it, controlling the movement of the display and the degree of magnification of the zoom.

I moved out to one end of the Needle, and worked my way steadily along it. I saw nothing—but at one point I imagined a hint of a bit more nothing than usual.

“Look at the star field.” I halted the display. “I think an extra area is being masked out. Can you change the brightness and pick up fainter background stars?”

Shaker said nothing, but he leaned over and pressed one button. The intensity of the display increased. Thousands of added stars and galaxies filled the screen.

It was easy to see it now. The spike of the Needle, delineated against a deep space backdrop, was thicker at one point. There was a bulge, a broadening of the smooth line. I zoomed as far as the system would go, and still saw only blackness.

I was ready to resume the scan along the Needle, disappointed at my failure, when Danny Shaker leaned over my shoulder.

“Not too fast, Jay. I don’t see anything either, but let’s try another part of the spectrum. Run us through the wavelengths, ultraviolet to deep radio.”

Maybe he thought that was a straightforward request, but it was beyond me. I moved out of the way and watched Danny Shaker exercise another brief command sequence.

“Hard U/V,” he said. “No return signal. Same for the visible, full absorption there and in the near infra-red.” He was explaining aloud for my benefit. “Let’s try thermal. Nothing there either—”

“Wait. Stop it there.”

I had seen something. Black on black, a deeper shade of shadow. The whole line of the Needle was dark—but I sensed that one part was darker than the rest.

“That’s a thermal signature,” Shaker said. “Let’s take a look at actual temperatures. Show me where.” He touched another set of keys, and a cursor appeared on the screen. He moved it a little way off the point I indicated.

“Not there,” I said. “A bit more over to the right.”

“I know. We need this for comparison.” Numbers appeared below the cursor. “I’m querying at different wavelengths. The background shows a maximum at sixty micrometers, fifty-two degrees absolute. That’s about right for ambient, the temperature of a radiating black body this far from Maveen. So this part of the Needle is absorbing shorter wavelength solar energy perfectly, and emitting it as long-wave thermal radiation. Now for the real test. We ask for the temperature as we go, and see what happens. Show me where.”

Under my direction the cursor began to move, creeping to the center of the darkest area. The region below the cursor began to fall—and fall again.

“Thirty-seven. Thirty-two.” Shaker was repeating the values to himself. “Twenty-four. Fifteen. My God, how much lower? Eleven, seven—can’t go much farther. Five. Four. Three.”

The cursor was at the exact center of the dark region, and the numerical display below it had steadied to a constant value.

“Two point seven degrees,” Shaker said softly. “How about that, Jay.”

“What about it?” It meant nothing to me.

“That point, right where the cursor is sitting, is at the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. How can we observe the background, but not see the stars?” Shaker stared around the room, where the crew still showed high excitement. Finally he was showing signs of that excitement himself. “The answer is, you can’t see background without stars, not in any normal region of space. So that’s no normal region of space.”

He leaned back in his seat. “It’s the Eye, Jay, right there. That’s where we have to go, through the Eye of the Needle. That’s where we look for Godspeed Base. That’s where we find the Godspeed Drive.”