Godspeed Page 11

  "Me too. Poor old Walter. He really didn't want to come, you know, he's happiest in a library. But Doctor Xavier talked him into it."

  "I don't see why either of you came." That had been on my mind since I met the two of them. "You don't seem anything like spacers."

  "We don't!" He glared at me, and his face took on a pinker tone. I realized that other things came along with that flaming mop. "What about you. How old are you?"

  "Sixteen."

  "That's what I thought. You're just a kid. What are you doing on this trip?"

  That gave me a problem. I couldn't tell him, but also I couldn't tell him why I couldn't tell him.

  "I'm a sort of trainee. I want to be a spacer when I'm old enough."

  That last part was true enough, and James Swift nodded. He calmed down a little. "I used to think that way myself when I was your age. You'll change your mind, though, when you've met a few spacers."

  I had met more than he suspected, but I didn't want to disagree with him or let the conversation go anywhere near Paddy Enderton. I switched subjects. "Dr. Swift, I still don't understand what you do."

  "Call me Jim. We're not at the university now, and we're going to be spending a lot of time together." He held out his hand, something he hadn't done when we were first introduced, and I felt stable enough to be able to reach out and shake it.

  "Be careful how you handle Walter, though," he went on. "Always call him Doctor Hamilton. He likes to sit on his title, though he's nowhere near as smart as I am. But why do you say you don't understand what I do? Weren't you listening this afternoon?"

  And I'll be careful with you, too, I thought. But all I said was, "I listened. But I couldn't make sense of any of it. Nor could Captain Shaker."

  We both looked to the door, wondering when Danny Shaker and the others were likely to be back. Until they returned we had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  "You said you don't teach," I added. "I never heard of a professor before who isn't a teacher."

  "I had a few . . . disagreements. About the right way to deal with students who were idiots." He glanced away from me. "I think I may be too used to working with specialists. Let me try again on the explanations. You tell me the minute I don't seem to make sense. Do you know what atoms and electrons are?"

  "Of course I do! I may be only sixteen, but I'm not a halfwit."

  "Sorry. Well, the rules that tell how atoms and the things they're made of behave are quite different from the rules that apply for big objects. Movement from one condition to another, or the transfer of energy, takes place in individual steps."

  "I know that, too. They're called quanta."

  "Right. You're ahead of a lot of the people who come to study at the university. Some of them are allowed in when they don't know anything." An irritated look, and the face reddening again. "Anyway, quanta just means pieces, and we say that energy and atomic states are quantized. But other things can be quantized. Energy is carried from place to place by things called fields, and those fields are quantized, too. That's usually called second quantization. And last of all, space itself is quantized. That's called third quantization."

  "You've lost me. You mean space, like space. Like there is out here?" I looked around me, but we were in an interior chamber of Upside and all I could see were walls.

  "Yes. Space is quantized."

  "But empty space is just—well, empty. It's nothing. That's what the word means."

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Jim Swift wrinkled up his forehead. "When I sit back and listen to myself, I have to agree with you. Empty space ought to be empty, by definition. We need a different word. Let's talk about vacuum instead. When you set up the theory correctly, you find that even when a vacuum has no matter in it, it's not really empty. It has energy, a thing called the vacuum energy. If you could get at the vacuum energy, and use it in the right way, then you might be able to do something else. You might be able to trade energy for movement. You could have very rapid movement, through point to point in quantized space."

  "Can you really do that?"

  "Well . . . no. But that's what I study, at the university. It's my specialty. And don't laugh, but I'll tell you what I think. And I believe that what I think on this subject is better than anyone ever thought before." When he was talking about anything but work—and wasn't busy losing his temper—his voice was easygoing and diffident. But when he was lecturing me, he took on the strangest mixture of arrogance and distant calm.

  "I believe," he went on, "that there was a time, before the Isolation, when people knew how to tap the vacuum energy. And they could use that and third quantization to travel in space. Travel fast, much faster than light. Quantum transitions take no time at all."

  "The Godspeed Drive!" I wondered how much Doctor Eileen had talked, after swearing the rest of us to strict secrecy.

  "Exactly. And if that's true, the big mystery is this: What went wrong? Why did the ships stop coming? Walter tends to be a bit stuffy and arrogant, but he actually knows his subject very well. And he insists that the old records—such as they are—show that everything went wrong instantly. One minute, ships and supplies arriving; the next, nothing. Erin was on its own, struggling to survive and only just making it. No messages, no warnings, no explanations. The spacers sometimes come back and tell us there are strange objects out in the Forty Worlds, things like the Luimneach Anomaly. But their information raises more questions than it answers. Maybe this trip will be different."

  I could see why Eileen Xavier wanted Jim Swift and Walter Hamilton along on the journey. But what had she said to them?

  An answer to that question had to wait, though, because Danny Shaker was floating back into the room. "Your colleague is feeling much better," he said to Jim Swift. "How about you?"

  "I'm fine. Where is Walter? I'd like to see him."

  "Come with me." Danny Shaker turned and floated out again.

  Jim Swift followed, much more clumsily. Movement in little or no gravity was obviously going to take some getting used to. For lack of anything better to do I tagged along behind, bouncing now and again off walls, floor and ceiling and struggling to learn the right combination of muscles.

  The corridor that we were moving in was long, straight, and featureless, but after thirty or forty meters I began to feel a definite sense of down. My feet didn't just touch the floor, they pressed on it a little bit.

  The sensation of weight steadily increased, until at the end of the corridor we came to a big circular room. It reminded me of a ward in the Toltoona hospital, bare, overheated, and filled with uncomfortable-looking beds.

  Walter Hamilton was sitting on one of them, his color much improved from the last time I had seen him. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen or Uncle Duncan.

  "Food machines through there," Shaker said, nodding to a big sliding door. "Are you hungry?"

  Walter Hamilton put his hands to his stomach and seemed appalled at the idea, and Jim Swift shook his head and sank onto a bed next to his colleague.

  Danny Shaker turned to me. "Jay?"

  It was hard to believe, but although my stomach still wanted to float up into my throat, I was suddenly starving. I nodded.

  "I thought so. Come on." And then, as he led the way through the doors, which opened automatically at our approach, "You're a natural, Jay. You're going to make a fine spacer."

  When he said that I couldn't help thinking of Paddy Enderton, with liquor on his breath and his big, sweaty, insincere face pushed close to mine, saying, "You'll be the finest spacer that ever lifted off Erin." But there was a world of difference between the two men: Enderton gruff and slovenly, Danny Shaker soft-spoken and precise in speech and movement. I resolved to study the easy, economical way he moved in low gravity, and learn to imitate it.

  We reached the machines, and Danny Shaker showed me how to operate them, how to make the food selection and key in the way that I wanted it cooked and prepared.

  The food itself was a curious disappointmen
t. It was edible enough, but somehow I had expected that space food ought to be different from the food down on Erin. Of course, it was exactly the same. As Shaker pointed out to me, every morsel of food that I—or anyone else—consumed in space was grown down on the surface of Erin, and shipped up. The only exception was salt. There were huge deposits of that on Sligo, the fourth moon of Antrim, and ton after ton was shipped down to Erin before Winterfall.

  "And lucky for us that we can go to Sligo and mine it," said Shaker. "Because there's precious little to be found on Erin. Salt is sodium chloride, and sodium's a rarity back down there."

  "I don't like salt."

  "Maybe not. But you need it. A human can't live without it. If we couldn't get into space from Erin, I doubt there'd be a person alive there now."

  It was something else to ponder. Back home people gave the impression that the things coming to Erin from the Forty Worlds were nice to have, but not really essential. Now I was hearing that Erin couldn't exist without the spacers.

  "Come on." Danny Shaker had watched me eat, without showing any interest in food himself. "We've got work to do."

  "I thought we were ready to leave."

  "We are. Tom Toole and the rest of the crew ought to be up from Erin by now. They'll be on board the Cuchulain, along with Doctor Xavier. But we are going to be away for a long time, and I always do the final check of supplies and ship condition. That way I can't blame anybody but myself, if we get into deep space and things aren't right."

  I had been longing to see the Cuchulain since I first heard the ship's name, but there was one more scary experience to go through before I could do that. Only a small part of Upside held an atmosphere. The rest of it, including the access paths to all the deep-space ships, sat in vacuum.

  With Shaker's help I eased my way into a suit, making the thirty-six point checks that in a few weeks would become automatic: air, filters (dual), heat, insulation, temperature, communication, nutrition, elimination (dual), medication, attitude control (triple), position jets (dual), joints (thirteen), seals (four), and suit condition displays (three).

  Then came the two minutes while the pumps returned the air of the chamber we were in to the pressurized part of Upside, and I watched my suit's external pressure gauge drop steadily to zero. Soon there was nothing between me and hard vacuum but the thin shell of my suit.

  Danny Shaker saved me again, acting as though what we were doing was the most natural thing in the world. "If you're ever not quite happy with anything while the pressure's going down," he said casually, "all you have to do is press the Restore panel on the wall there. The chamber will repressurize within five seconds. Hold tight, now. We're off."

  He was actually the one doing the holding. Almost before I knew what was happening he had taken the arm of my suit in his gauntleted hand, and was steering us out of the lock. I had assumed that we would emerge into open space. Wrong again. We were in a corridor no different from the one that had led us to the chamber—except that the external pressure showed as negligible, and the external temperature was a hundred degrees below zero.

  The final surprise was the Cuchulain itself. It floated in a gigantic open hangar, controlled in its position by gentle electromagnetic fields. Its shape was neither the bowl of the ferry ships, nor the slim needle of an atmospheric flier. Instead I found myself staring at a long warty stick, with a flared cone at one end and a small sphere attached to the other.

  "Drive, cargo area, and living quarters," said Danny Shaker's voice through my suit communications unit.

  I could see that the ship was far bigger than a first sight suggested. The little sphere showed glassy pinpricks and dark flecks on its sides. They had to be viewing ports and locks.

  "There's no place for cargo," I said. "Do you hang it outside?"

  Shaker laughed, his voice no different in my ears than it had been back on Erin. "I sometimes wish we could. The midsection between the drive cone and the living sphere is a flexible membrane around a rigid column. When the Cuchulain is carrying its maximum cargo load, it looks like a big bloated ball with a little pimple on each end. Balancing it for flight can be a pain. But I don't think you'll be seeing it like that on this trip."

  I ought to have asked myself why he thought that, since according to Doctor Eileen our mission was supposed to be a secret. But I didn't think of it. Instead I said, "How do you land? There's no place for a cushion plate."

  "Very true. The Cuchulain doesn't land. Ever. This is a deep space ship."

  "So how do you pick up your cargo?"

  "With the cargo beetles. See them?"

  And I did, when he pointed them out. Each of the little warts along the axis of the ship was a whole ship in itself, a rounded shell hugging the central column.

  "But they don't have cushion plates, either."

  "Because they don't need them. The Forty Worlds are a low gravity environment except for Antrim and Tyrone, and those two are gas giants where we never land. Nowhere else has a hundredth the pull of Erin. Lucky for us, or scavenging would be impossible."

  While I was asking questions—I still had a hundred more—we had been approaching the structure at one end that Danny Shaker called the living sphere. It loomed ahead of us now, twice as big as a whole ferry ship. I could see that its exterior, a uniform cloudy grey from a distance, was a whole patchwork mess of seams and scars and scratches.

  "And not surprising," Danny Shaker said, in answer to my question. "The Cuchulain is like the rest of our ships. It's old. Old and beat up. Built long before the Isolation, and been through a lot."

  "But why don't we build new ones?"

  "Ah, that's a fair question. We'll talk about that when we have a bit more time. All right?"

  He sounded casual enough, but something made me think that he didn't want to talk to me about that at all until he had first discussed it with Doctor Eileen. With every kilometer that we moved away from the surface of Erin, I had the feeling that the balance between life down on the planet and life out in the Forty Worlds shifted. The Isolation loomed more real and more significant, changing from vague myth to a central fact of survival. Living with Mother on the shore of Lake Sheelin, I had felt myself in a safe, stable world. Now I was hearing that Erin survived only because space systems in place before the Isolation were still working—and those systems were becoming steadily older and more worn as the years went on.

  The interior of the Cuchulain, when we finally passed through the entry lock and shed our suits, did nothing to change that idea. The chambers where I first met the rest of the crew were clean enough, and kept in good order. But everything showed the signs of long, hard wear. It's tempting to say that the crew themselves showed those signs most of all.

  With only two samples to judge from, I don't know what I had expected. Captain Shaker and Tom Toole were as different as two men could be: Tom Toole big-boned and gravel-voiced and argumentative; Danny Shaker slender and soft-spoken and neat.

  The rest of the crew seemed just as diverse when I was introduced to them by Danny Shaker.

  "This is Patrick O'Rourke." Shaker led me to the first man in the line. "Patrick and Tom Toole are like my right and left hands. They keep things going when I'm not here. Anything you need, Jay, you ask one of them. Now, here's Sean Wilgus, Connor Bryan, William Synge, Donald Rudden, Alan Kiernan, Seamus Sterne, Dougal Linn, Joseph Munroe . . ."

  There were nine general crew men, in addition to Pat O'Rourke and Tom Toole. I lost track of their names after the first two, although I did notice some peculiarities. Donald Rudden was so fat that I could not imagine how he carried his weight around—though that problem should be less in space than down on Erin. Sean Wilgus didn't even pretend to be pleased to meet me, he glared when I came to him.

  Everyone wheezed as they growled their greetings, just about as bad as Paddy Enderton, but Robert Doonan certainly held the record for that. Every breath turned into a gasp. Apparently Danny Shaker was a real exception among spacers in having good w
orking lungs. He was also an exception in size. Patrick O'Rourke was a black-haired giant, the biggest man I had ever seen, and the others were all huge. Tom Toole, whom I had thought of as big when I met him, an inch or two taller than Uncle Duncan, turned out to be one of the smallest.

  There was one other thing that they had in common, but I didn't know what it meant. As each crewman bent to shake my hand, he stared at me with genuine interest and curiosity. I could even sense it in Sean Wilgus, behind the hostility.

  By the time that I reached the last man in line, Rory O'Donovan, I began to feel that perhaps they all recognized something unusual in me. Maybe, as two people different as Paddy Enderton and Daniel Shaker had suggested, I was going to make an outstanding spacer. Maybe these men saw that potential, and instinctively reacted to it.

  I decided to do my best to make the prophecy come true. When Dan Shaker asked me if I would like to go around the ship with him as he made his final inspection of supplies, drive, control systems, and cargo beetles, I leaped at the chance.

  And when, eight hours later, everything was pronounced ready and the Cuchulain left the hangar on Upside and swooped off for deep space and the Forty Worlds, I didn't have a worry left in my head. I had no doubt that the next month or two would be the happiest of my whole life.

  CHAPTER 13

  Twenty-four hours after the Cuchulain started our outward journey, the inside of my head began to sort itself out. So much had happened to me, in so short a time, that it had produced what Doctor Eileen called an "experience overload." I didn't have a name for it. All I knew was that I had seen masses of stuff and I'd had it all explained to me—but often I only understood when I met the same thing for a second or third time. Even then I had problems.

  For instance, before we left the Upside hangar Danny Shaker had shown me over the interior of the ship. We had visited the engine room, and the drive unit at the far end—off limits during powered flight to everyone except suicides—and we had been all through the labyrinth of the expandable cargo hold, corkscrewed down now into its tightest form. Shaker had pointed out the electrical supply system, and the air duct system, and the various vacuum escape systems, and he even explained the waste disposal apparatus in the living area. But it was only late the next day, wandering around with Doctor Eileen, that I began to get any feeling for what was where.