Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 31

All over. No hope. No chance of escape. The person who snapped me out of that hangdog attitude was not, oddly enough, Jim Swift, or Mel Fury, or even Doctor Eileen. It was Danny Shaker and his Golden Rule: Don’t give up.

Even before I thought of that I had a personal proof that I was far from dead. Doctor Eileen insisted that as a first priority Jim Swift and I must have our wounds attended to. She swabbed his temple and his closed eye, then tackled his bent and broken nose. I heard the bone crack horribly when she straightened it. His forehead went pale beneath his thatch of red hair, but he didn’t utter a sound.

So then I couldn’t let it show, either, not with Mel looking on. Not even when Doctor Eileen probed far up inside my nose, to do what she called “a remedial septum straightening.”

The inside of my head, from my nostrils to up behind my eyes, caught fire. I thought to myself, I’m not dead yet. Dead people don’t hurt like this. I didn’t cry out, though, but when she was done and had given me a quick injection I muttered that I had to take a look at the Cuchulain’s engines. I fled. When I reached the cargo area I stayed there for a long time. I felt dizzy and sweaty, as though I wanted to throw up but couldn’t.

When I got to the drive unit the monitors gave me the same bad news as those on the bridge. Of five clustered main engines, three would never fire again. The other two were in poor shape, but by using them in short bursts and turning the whole ship between thrusts, I might be able to move the Cuchulain.

The acceleration would be miserably low. I made an estimate. If we used the remaining engines until they both died completely, then coasted all the way to Erin, we would be on our way for seven or eight years.

Could our supplies last so long? I didn’t think so. We had provisioned for a dozen people when we set out, but for a far shorter period. Once we were clear of the Maze, though, we could send a distress signal. With lots of luck we would be heard at Erin’s Upside Spaceport, and a ship might come out to meet us. If it didn’t, the Cuchulain with its dead drive would float by Erin and off to nowhere.

I returned to the control room, to tell the others that we faced the problem of surviving for many years in space.

Doctor Eileen was not there. Instead Mel and Jim Swift were crouched together by the control panel. He had Walter Hamilton’s electronic notebook in his hand, while Mel was holding the little navaid that we had been given on Paddy’s Fortune.

“Just the person.” Jim looked awful, but he sounded full of pep. I wondered what kind of shot Doctor Eileen had given him, and wished I’d had the same.

“Can you fly the Cuchulain again?” Jim asked.

“I think so. But not very well.”

I tried to explain my idea of coasting toward Erin, but Jim cut me off before I got halfway. “Wrong direction, boyo. We’d never make it. If we’re to have any chance at all, we have to go there.”

He was pointing to the dark pupil of the Eye. The last place, it seemed to me, that we wanted to go. It was a dull, glassy black, and it made me think of a dead fish eye.

“Why there?” I said. “Suppose we get in, and the Cuchulain’s engines are too far gone to get us out again? You can’t even send a signal from inside the Eye.”

“It’s the Slowdrive,” Jim said, as though that explained everything.

“You won’t find a drive much slower than what we’ve got now,” I said. I told him about the three dead engines, and the dying pair that remained. “Seven or eight years from here to Erin. If we could last that long.”

“Which we can’t. Doctor Xavier and I have already talked about supplies. No more than two years, and that’s starving ourselves.” Jim Swift had killed my only hope, but he went on cheerfully, “Maybe the Slowdrive, even if we find it, will be no better. But I don’t have enough information to prove that. The evidence is inconsistent. This”—he held up Walter Hamilton’s electronic notebook, and cackled like a madman—“suggests that ‘slow drive’ hardware was in an experimental state when the Isolation took place. And that”—he pointed to the navaid that Mel was holding—“indicates that what it terms the ‘slow option’ should be here, somewhere within the Net.”

“We’ll never find it before the drive dies.” I was staring despondently at the huge array of nodes.

“Not if we look there,” said Jim. “Danny Shaker said there was nothing but bits and pieces at the Net nodes. I know he was a villain, but he was plenty smart when it came to space. So I believe him, there’s nothing useful for us in the Net. That leaves the Godspeed Base itself—inside the Eye.”

“We already looked there.”

“No. Shaker and the crew explored the big lobe, and the three of us found the Godspeed ship in the smallest one. No one ever explored the middle region.”

“The flickery one? You said it would be dangerous.”

He gave me a horrible one-eyed leer, peering like a lunatic owl around the plaster beak that Doctor Eileen had placed on his swollen nose. “You sound like Mel. That was then. This is now. The definition of dangerous has changed. Can you fly us in?”

“Of course I can.” I found the question insulting. Wasn’t I a “natural,” according to no less an authority than Danny Shaker?—wherever he might be.

I had changed, too, and in the last five minutes. It didn’t occur to me that my injection was doing as much to me as Jim Swift’s was to him. But I was certain that I could fly anything, including the collapsing Cuchulain.

How far could I fly it? That was a different question. I didn’t even care. It was flying time.

Here’s my advice: If you have to pilot a ship that you don’t know how to fly, into a situation that you’ve been told is deadly dangerous, first go and ram your face into a wall and break your nose. Then get yourself shot full of drugs. After that you may be out of danger—or at least dead—before you know you’re in it.

When we first went into the Eye I had heard Danny Shaker’s quiet comment: The Cuchulain was slowed in its passage through the membrane. Now, nursing failing engines and surrounded on all sides by dense grey fog, I realized how much Shaker had left unsaid.

The power draw of the drive had doubled, but our rate of progress was slowing—and we were not yet to the Eye’s interior.

I had to make a choice. Keep going, and ruin the engines forever? Or try to pull back?

It was really no decision at all. We might not survive within the Eye; we would die for sure if we remained outside.

I ignored the screens and kept my eyes on the status monitors. Both engines were about equally bad. Both of them were red-lining. All I could do was balance them as closely as I could; and when Mel, watching the displays, quietly said, “Coming clear,” I knew it before she spoke. The engines were in their death rattle, but in spite of that the Cuchulain’s speed was increasing. We were through.

I cut the drive. We drifted on toward the base. If I had stared before at its globular middle section, now I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Or keep them on it. Flashes of light ran within the surface, with bright afterimages that fooled me into fancying strange shapes within the globe. I could imagine a giant human ear, a human face, a great fist clutching a twisted caricature of a Godspeed ship.

“Who goes inside Flicker, and who stays?” That was Mel, naming the middle region at the same time as she voiced my own question: Who would go? With the drive dead, the Cuchulain was no better than a derelict adrift in space. This time I wouldn’t remain behind.

“Can we leave the Eye again?” asked Doctor Eileen.

I shook my head. “Not in this ship.”

“Then we may as well stick together. Collect anything that you want to take with you. I’ll start loading food and drink. There’s nothing to be gained by anyone staying here.”

She was right. The Cuchulain would be our tomb if we stayed. All the same, I hadn’t expected her to give the order to leave permanently. I had an odd feeling of security abandoned as we closed down the Cuchulain’s energy and life-support systems and went one by one into the cargo hold, adding our little packages of personal possessions to the pile of provisions in a cargo beetle; and soon I was piloting us clear, convinced that I was doing a better job of flying than I ever had before—with no one able to appreciate it.

“Stay together, or separate?” Doctor Eileen asked Jim Swift the next important question as we approached a dark part of the middle sphere, closing on what I hoped might be entry points.

“Both.” Jim Swift had thought it through. “We go into Flicker together, and divide up the interior search when we get there. We’ll check back at the entrance on a regular schedule. Anyone who finds something interesting waits at the beetle for the others.”

“And nobody”—Doctor Eileen was staring at me—“plays with something he finds that might be a drive, or anything else, until we’ve discussed it together.”

If anyone was likely to get in trouble with a new gadget, it wasn’t me—it was Mel. But there was no time for argument, because the middle section of the base was looming up in front of us like a great, smooth wall. The internal lightning flickered brighter. It showed three dark openings where we might be able to lodge the beetle. I headed for the biggest.

Our arrival was reassuring. The port contained a lock, little different from the airlocks at the other lobe, or even at Muldoon Upside Port. We had been in suits since we left the Cuchulain, so the pressure change didn’t affect us when the lock cycled us in.

“Close to Erin surface pressure,” said Jim Swift. He was examining a wall monitor. “But we won’t be breathing this one. Helium, neon, and xenon. Nice inert atmosphere to preserve things, but no trace of oxygen. Keep your suits tight.”

The inner door of the lock was opening. It revealed a featureless corridor, which thirty yards farther on branched into four.

“North, south, east, west,” Doctor Eileen said. “I guess that settles one question. Jay, how long do you have?”

I glanced at my air supply. “Thirteen hours, nearly fourteen.”

“Mel? Jim?”

“Sixteen hours.”

“Twelve.”

“So I’m lowest, I’ve got a bit more than eleven.”

“Back here in nine or ten, then?” Jim Swift was itching to get started, his eyes glinting behind his visor.

“No!” Doctor Eileen was in charge again. “What happens if one of us gets into trouble and can’t make it back? We have to give ourselves enough time to help.”

Gets into trouble, I thought. You mean we’re not in trouble already? But I didn’t say anything, and Jim Swift came back with, “All right. How about six hours? Don’t forget we may have to do a lot of looking before we find anything. And the longer we stay here talking…”

“Six it is.” Doctor Eileen was moving forward. “Prompt. Anyone who isn’t back here by then and hasn’t met some sort of problem will have one—with me. I’m talking to you, Jay, and you, too, Mel. I’ll skin you alive if you’re not on time. Let’s go.”

I hung back, making the final series of suit checks that Danny Shaker had drummed into my head time after time. I was the last to arrive at the corridor branch. The other three had taken the top, left, and right forks.

I was left with the bottom branch. The “south” branch. “Going south.” It was Uncle Toby’s favorite expression to describe dying. “Old Jessie, she just packed her bags and went south.” Let’s hope it didn’t apply to me on Flicker.

My branch of the corridor was plain walls, with no rooms or exits leading off it. It headed downward for no more than twenty or thirty yards before it leveled off to run parallel to the way that we had entered. That was puzzling, because I felt as though I was again moving straight toward the center of Flicker. Had I lost my sense of direction?

Soon I had a bigger problem. My corridor was ending. In nothing. Or rather, in a fish-eye circle of misty dark-grey, like the membrane that surrounded the Eye itself.

The gravity inside Flicker was too small to be useful. I had to use my suit controls to slow my forward progress, until I hung just a couple of feet from the dead circle. Ought I to try to go on through? It wasn’t just Doctor Eileen’s warning about taking risks with new things that held me in place. The circle itself scared me.

I reached out one suited arm and pushed my hand delicately into the darkness. I felt a slight, sticky resistance, but that was all. Unless it was very deep I should have no trouble passing through. I was not sure I dared to try.

The thing that persuaded me to enter the dark eye of the circle had nothing to do with courage. I realized that I was only a minute or two away from the airlock. I was not willing to go back and sit near the cargo beetle for the next five and half hours, then tell the others that my total achievement had been to “explore” less than a hundred yards of blank corridor. I knew how Jim Swift and Mel would react to that confession.

I moved back a few steps along the corridor. It might be difficult to get any traction from the walls or floor once I was within the circle itself. I turned the suit forward impulse to a medium level, built up speed, and plunged feet first into the dark center.

I didn’t close my eyes, but I might as well have. The darkness inside was total. It didn’t last long enough for my eyes to adjust, and that was fortunate, because before I knew it I was emerging into a light so intense that the suit’s visor lagged for a second before it could make a dimming adjustment.

Five seconds earlier I had been in a narrow corridor. Now I had emerged into a chamber so big that portals like the one from which I had emerged were no more than dark pinpricks on the distant walls. For a moment I thought that the interior itself was empty, except for flickering regions of light and dark. Then I realized that the interior patterns of dark and light formed moving shapes.

Familiar shapes. I recognized one that was far away from me. It was the figure of a man, gigantic and insubstantial. He was hundreds of feet high, but no more solid than a pall of light-grey smoke from a bonfire. Through him I could see the far wall of Flicker.

Given that first reference point I began to make sense of the nearer objects, and at last of the whole scene. On the right-hand side I was looking at a ship’s living quarters, with a crew moving around within. And on the left side, spreading all the way to the edge of the great chamber…

I peered, and puzzled. This was hard to make out: the shadow of an immense band of light, curving around on itself again and again. But I could not see any place where it closed. It formed a huge, hazy spiral, twisting away into space.

As I followed the turning band back from right to left, I made the final connection. This was not merely a crew and a ship. It was a crew in a ship with the Godspeed Drive. I had been looking at the corkscrew rear portion, drawn in luminous fog. And this was not just any crew.

I stared at the closest of the gigantic, lumbering figures. From my position close to its midriff I could not see the face, surmounting a huge body and diminished by distance. But at the level where I hovered I could see a dark band around the midsection. Stuck into it was a foggy white cylinder, thirty or forty feet long, with a bent handle. Like a pistol. Like Walter Hamilton’s pistol. Tucked into a belt. Duncan West’s belt.

As I stared another shape drifted past the static figure of Duncan, creeping forward with slow, hundred-yard strides. The hair was a dark cloud tied behind the head. Giant hands, bigger than cargo beetles, crossed a prodigious chest and gripped the biceps of arms each longer than the Cuchulain.

It was Danny Shaker. According to Jim Swift, Shaker and his whole crew had vanished forever, thrown into another universe by the power of the Godspeed Drive. Yet they walked in front of me now. I could not make out individual faces, but I thought I recognized Donald Rudden’s ponderous bulk, a hundred times as large as life, and the cloudy swirl of Tom Toole’s carroty-red hair.

I watched and watched, unable to take my eyes off the silent action before me. The crew of the Cuchulain were as slow as they were big. Each giant step took an age, each mouth gaped and closed in what I recognized at last as a pattern of glacial speech. I used my suit controls, and found that I could float toward—and through—anything in the chamber. For a long time I hovered right in front of Danny Shaker’s face, trying and failing to observe the glint of life in the fog of his grey eyes. On his scale my suited figure would be no bigger than a large beetle. There was no sign that he had any awareness of my presence.

I moved with him, hypnotized, studying his face as we crept backward and forward across the ship’s cabin. The rest of the crew was now sitting at a table talking, ten eternal minutes to each sentence. Shaker stood aloof. I decided from his actions that as usual he was worrying about the ship. He went and had a long conversation with a seated giant whom I took to be Patrick O’Rourke. From my point of view it was a perfectly silent discussion. Even with my suit amplifier as high as it would go, all I heard was a deep bass rumble like distant avalanches in the mountains far west of Lake Sheelin; far above it was the hiss of air within my own suit. At last Shaker headed off toward a different part of the chamber.

The sight of his destination, a shadowy wall filled with spectral dials, at last made me consider my own situation.

I queried my suit for the time, and could not believe what it told me. Close to five hours had passed since I had left the cargo beetle.

I took a last look at the crew. It should be safe to leave. At the rate they were going, they would sit and chat for another couple of days.

I headed back to the beetle and arrived there bursting to tell the others what I had seen. No one was present, not even Doctor Eileen, for all her threats about being late.

I went inside, replenished my suit’s air supply, and settled down to wait. Four hours later I was still waiting. In that time I had made half a dozen trips as far as the corridor branch point, but seen and heard nothing. In my sixth hour of waiting, when I was absolutely convinced that there had been a major disaster and I was alone in the space base, Jim Swift arrived at the cargo beetle.

He slowly opened the visor of his suit and nodded a greeting.

“What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t believe he was so casual.

“Not one interesting thing. Chamber after chamber of experimental equipment, all the way across to the other side of Flicker. No sign of any ship. I hope somebody else had better luck.”

“Where have you been? You’re six hours late.”

“Eh!” He scowled at me. “I’m not late—I’m a few minutes early.”

“You’ve been gone for nearly twelve hours.”

“Nonsense.” He started to query his suit, then changed his mind and pointed to the control panel of the beetle. “Six hours since I left, within a couple of minutes.”

The panel chronometer agreed with him. I queried my suit. It reported a time six hours later than the beetle’s clock. I stared at Jim Swift.

“What’s wrong, Jay?” he said. “Seeing things?”

“Hearing things. Listen.” I played out the time again, at external volume.

“I hear it.” He shrugged. “But it’s wrong. What have you been doing that might have ruined your suit’s clock?”

“I’ve been—I’ve seen—”

“Don’t babble.” He scented something interesting, so he was more sympathetic than annoyed. “Start at the beginning, and take it slow. What happened when you left here?”

I explained everything: the dark membrane, my passage through it, the world-sized spherical cavity beyond, and the Godspeed ship with its gargantuan crew.

“No,” he said, when I described the dimensions of the chamber. “I traveled miles in the interior of Flicker, and there’s no room for anything like what you’re describing. You say everyone was enormous, and they moved in slow motion?”

“I timed a blink of Danny Shaker’s eyes. It took nearly a minute.”

“That’s what you measured. But when you returned here, you believed that you had been gone for six hours. Isn’t it obvious that you were really away only a few minutes?—just the time it took you to travel along the corridor to the membrane, and then after you returned through it, the time to come back here.”

“I spent a long time inside—”

“You thought you did. And as far as you are concerned, that is valid. You, and your clock, were speeded up, by a big factor—a hundred or more. And I’ll bet you were only the same fraction of your real size, too, for a consistent change in space-time scale that preserves light-speed. Jay, you found a Godspeed space. A Godspace. A place where people can do experiments in an alternate spacetime. It’s fascinating, but it won’t help us go home.”

“What about Shaker and the crew? They didn’t vanish into another universe, the way you said. They’re still here, inside Flicker. I saw them.”

“No, you didn’t. What you saw is some kind of fading record in Godspace, a trace of what was happening to Shaker and the crew at the time when the Godspeed drive was turned on. Nothing in that chamber takes place in normal space and time. If you’ll take me there, I’ll prove it.”

He headed for the hatch. Before I could close my suit visor and follow him we were interrupted. The lock was operating. As soon as its cycle was complete, Mel popped through. Right behind her was Doctor Eileen, saying before she was fully into the cabin, “I know, I know, don’t tell me. Six hours and fifteen minutes. It doesn’t matter.”

Because she was the one who was late. But it certainly didn’t matter to Mel. She grabbed my hands. Before I knew what was happening she had spun us up and around the cabin. She didn’t have complete free-fall control, and we bounced together off walls and ceiling.

“We found the ship!” she sang out, while I struggled to make her let go. “We found it, we found it. We’re going home.”

“Doctor Eileen?” Jim Swift didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to. I turned in mid-air, to watch Eileen Xavier’s reaction.

She had opened her suit and was standing motionless. Finally she nodded, grudgingly. “We found—something. But I don’t want to raise false hopes. Until you’ve examined it, Jim, I’d better say no more than that.”

My discovery of the Godspace was lost in the excitement. We heard from Mel and Doctor Eileen in bits and pieces as they rushed us through a maze of corridors and open work areas.

They had started out along different branches of the main corridor, just like the rest of us. “But then then they merged,” Mel said, “and we ran into each other again in a few minutes. So after that we stuck together.”

“And found nothing useful.” Doctor Eileen was being extra cautious, to balance Mel’s euphoria. “There were workshops, hundreds and hundreds of them, just like these.” We were passing through a long series of chambers, each filled with mysterious machinery. “But we didn’t recognize anything that seemed significant—”

“—until we got to this point, and saw that. “Mel indicated a spidery structure, cradling a squashed cube that was vaguely familiar. “This is almost on the opposite side of Flicker from where we came in. It’s not that far as a straight-line journey from where we started, but we made lots of detours the first time we came here. When we arrived to this point we had been away over five hours. We were ready to return to the beetle.”

“You mean I was,” Doctor Eileen said. “But while I was making that decision Mel skipped on ahead of me.”

“I thought we might be getting close to exit ports, and I wanted to take a look at just one more chamber. Then I couldn’t resist a peek at the one after that.”

“And the one after that. I was all set to cuss at her, and tell her we were going back. But first I had to catch her. And when I finally did—”

“She was looking at this.”

Mel had timed our progress perfectly, because as she spoke those last words we were emerging into a docking facility. Hanging in a harness at the far end was another flattened cube. Attached to it was a nested set of fat rings, placed one beneath the other to form a blunt cone.

“It’s just the way it ought to be,” Mel went on. “Don’t you recognize it, Jay?”

Where had I seen it before?

“Well, I certainly do,” said Jim Swift. “We’re looking at the Slowdrive, the way it was drawn in Walter Hamilton’s notebook.”

“That’s what Mel said to me.” Doctor Eileen was controlling any sign of emotion. “The question is, Jim, is that really a working ship? Is it something Jay can use to fly us back to Erin?”

A real flight through space. I had shivers at that prospect, but Jim took it calmly enough.

“It’s smaller than I expected.” He moved slowly forward and began to circle the cradled ship. “But big enough for us. If the drive is complete, the way it appears to be, and if the ship has an energy source, to power the drive; and if we can learn to fly the ship, which will be more Jay’s job than mine; and if ‘Slowdrive’ doesn’t turn out to mean so slow that Erin’s a lifetime away…”

He turned to face the rest of us. “I’d have given big odds against, an hour ago. But if we get the right answers to all those ifs, then I think there’s a chance.

“Maybe Mel is right. Maybe we’ll be going home after all.”