Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 27

It’s a strange thing, but one person can enjoy an experience, while another sees the same event only as a source of irritation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One of Donald Rudden’s defects had become a virtue: Sit him in a comfortable chair with adequate supplies of food and drink, and an earthquake wouldn’t budge him. I decided that since he was nicely settled, Mel and I could safely go to the observation bubble on the topmost level of the living quarters. We sneaked up there together and I turned the highest magnification scopes onto the cargo beetle.

Or rather, we turned them onto where the cargo beetle had been. We were just in time to see it nuzzling in to a rendezvous with a port on the side of the structure’s big lobe.

Mel, sitting beside me, gasped. So did I. When the Cuchulain was far from the space base there had been no way of judging its size. Now we were closer, and the cargo beetle provided a direct standard of scale.

The base was monstrous. I estimated that the fat ellipsoid that the beetle was entering had to be at least as big as Paddy’s Fortune. It was a world of its own. Even the “tiny” third lobe on the top end of the figure-eight would be big enough to house the Cuchulain. As for the middle section, it still defeated my eyes. There was a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality that might make you think that our ship’s screen wasn’t working—except that everything else on the display appeared normal. I decided that the middle part of the base must be transparent, and lit from within, like a hollow ball of glass with a continuous lightning storm going on inside.

The beetle vanished quickly into the side of the base. Mel continued to study the display with every sign of interest, enjoying her first look in weeks at open space. But I, as an experienced and blasé space traveler, watched with huge frustration—because I should have been there, inside Godspeed Base, not hanging around on the Cuchulain while nothing happened.

In the middle of that thought, something very definite did happen. I heard a noise like the clatter of boots on the stairway that led up to the observation bubble.

Mel heard it, too. She turned to me. “You said that the man who was left behind—”

“I know. He never moves if he doesn’t have to.”

Except that the sound was definitely louder. Someone was ascending the staircase. I stared around, and saw what I should have noticed the moment we came in. The observation bubble had only one exit. It also had no place to hide.

“Mel,” I whispered. “The gun that I gave Doctor Eileen. Did she pass it on to you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let me have it.” I had fired it once. If I had to I could do it again.

She stared at me in dismay. “I don’t have it, Jay. As soon as I had that gun in my hand I knew I could never bear to shoot anyone. I gave it to Duncan West…”

…and left us totally helpless. The footsteps were right at the top of the staircase. The only thing left was surprise.

I launched myself feet-first toward the doorway. If I were lucky and timed it right, I would hit the intruder at chest level.

“No, Jay!” The shout came from Mel behind me.

I just had time to bend my legs and draw them up toward my body. I still hit the newcomer, right in his midsection, but I had softened the impact. I saw a mop of flaming red hair above Jim Swift’s startled face as he staggered, made a wild grab at the doorway, and barely avoided being thrown back down the staircase.

He must have reached out from pure reflex, because my driving feet had knocked all the wind out of him. For the next half minute he grovelled on the floor, struggling for breath, while Mel and I hovered uselessly around him.

At last Jim raised his head and croaked, “What the hell?”

It was all he could say before he ran out of air again. Mel lifted him up, while I gabbled explanations and excuses.

After a while he nodded. “All right, all right. You didn’t mean it. But you sure as hell did it.” He straightened up, winced, and felt his midriff.

“But why aren’t you on the cargo beetle?” I said. I couldn’t believe he had missed the boat, too.

“Because they’re dummies, that’s why!” Anger did him more good than apologies. The color came rushing back to his face. “Total idiots. I tried to warn that stupid crew, and all they did was say that I didn’t know about space. Me!”

“But you told me that you don’t,” said Mel. “You insisted that the trip on the Cuchulain was your first time in space.”

Jim Swift had probably told her exactly that, but he didn’t want to know it. His face became redder. “I don’t know about space. But I know a hell of a lot about space-time, more than the rest of them put together will ever know.”

Mel put her hand on his arm. “Calm down, Jim.”

It was the perfect way to make him do the opposite. “What’s knowing about space-time got to do with you not going with them now?” I asked hurriedly.

He glared at me instead of Mel. “I’ll tell you what. I was brought on this trip because I’m Erin’s expert on the theory of the Godspeed Drive, right? I’ve studied every fact and rumor and half-baked idea to do with the Drive for the past ten years, right? I know what a Godspeed Drive ship ought to look like. But people who don’t know anything about the Drive—like halfwit spacers—have the idea that a ship with a faster-than-light drive must be just like the Cuchulain, only bigger. They associate speed with size. And that’s totally wrong. A ship with a Godspeed Drive won’t need those big, clumsy engines. Because it’s superfast it won’t need living quarters this size.” He swung an arm around, to indicate all the space on the Cuchulain. “And if it’s a backup ship, for use only in emergencies when the usual Godspeed ships have a problem, it doesn’t need a great big space for cargo. It can be small—maybe no bigger than a cargo beetle.”

It sounded logical to me. Surely it would have impressed Doctor Eileen and Danny Shaker the same way.

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“I would have—if I’d had half a chance.” His voice was rising in pitch and volume. “I got there early. I started explaining to Tom Toole, and then that dummy O’Rourke came at me with a stupid question, and jackass Rory O’Donovan joined in. Before I knew it, there was no end of yelling and screaming.”

I caught Mel’s glance. I bet there was, it said, and I bet I know who was doing most of it.

“Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that. Who would?” Jim Swift stared at us, and we nodded sympathetically.

“You got into a fight?” asked Mel.

“No.” He gave a self-righteous sniff. “I left. The hell with them. If they fly over there and get themselves killed, it won’t be my fault. But I decided to fly a cargo beetle myself, once they were out of the way, and show them I was right in a way they could never dispute.”

“But if you follow them—” Mel protested.

“I wouldn’t follow them. I’d go to the logical place where you’d look for an emergency ship with a Godspeed Drive.” Jim Swift pointed at the display screen, to the tiny third lobe on the space base. “That’s where you’d store a small ship—not in that great stupid balloon at the other end, or in the flickering middle bit.”

“But why didn’t you go?” I asked.

He glared at me, frustration all over his face. “I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not one of your bone-brained spacers, that’s why. I can’t fly one of those stupid, beat-up, crap-heap, space-junk cargo beetles. Half the instruments on them don’t even work!”

“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.